


find (to search, to be found)

by kouraai



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Percy Jackson Fusion, Camp Half-Blood AU, Demigods, M/M, PJO AU, Percy Jackson and the Olympians AU, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-05-26
Updated: 2018-12-14
Packaged: 2019-05-14 01:23:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 33,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14759921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kouraai/pseuds/kouraai
Summary: Life for Ten decides to run its course very differently than for Taeyong. The strings of Fate play a duet.





	1. thirteen

Ten is found early. Earlier than most, because when he is thirteen years old, a gorgon - frazzled, old, and frankly, kind of a bitch - tries to turn him and his best friend into token Asian statues for the streets of Flushing, New York.

His story isn’t as dramatic as some. Ten and Doyoung are waiting to cross the street, en route to the Duane Reade a few blocks from their middle school in pursuit of an after-school snack. He’s staring absentmindedly at a domed mirror that displays a fish-eye view of the intersection when he spots the woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty inching towards him.

Her costume sucks. She’s got a mean grimace on her face, firstly, completely unlike the graceful expression on the Statue of Liberty. The green costume paint is obviously off color, and as she inches towards Ten he can see parts of bare skin exposed as her sleeves shift. Her robes are more of a toga, but the most off-putting part of her entire ensemble is the thinly-veiled look of murder in her eyes. His eyes start to water as he keeps looking at the woman in the mirror, and he nudges Doyoung.

“What’s up with that lady?” Ten whispers into Doyoung’s side. Doyoung is busy digging through one pocket of his school uniform blazer, but glances up when Ten elbows him again in the side.

“That lady? She’s homeless, dude, _Christ._ Lay off.”

“I know _that_ lady is homeless! I’m talking about the Statue of Liberty who’s shuffling really, really slowly closer to me.”

Doyoung gives Ten a withering look, but glances up at the domed mirror post anyway. He squints, then returns the death eye back to Ten. “Chill, dude. Just a costumer from Times Square going home.”

And then the woman, who is definitely a costumer but not going anywhere but uncomfortably close to Ten, lets loose a snarl and mutters. “Damn demigods. No life skills whatsoever. Can’t do their own laundry. Don’t know how to pay taxes. And _apparently_ ,” she growls a little louder, “don’t know how to tip in the service industry.”

Ten inches a little closer to Doyoung, who rolls his eyes but lets him move farther away from the janky Statue of Liberty. He taps his foot nervously. Why was the light taking so long?

“It’s common courtesy! Two dollars _minimum_ for a photo, and tourists think they can mess with us, too. Costumes don’t come cheap! And it’s pretty obvious we live off tips!” The Statue’s voice is rising now, frantic and frustrated, but her movement towards Ten is still slow and intentional, as if she thinks because their backs are turned she’s also invisible. And mute.

The light changes, and Doyoung moves to shake Ten off to cross. Ten stumbles, and in the split second that his balance is missing, the lady, no longer inconspicuous, lunges. Before Doyoung can even turn around to see the reason for Ten’s confused silence, Ten has both feet planted on the ground, confusion and fear welling up in his chest, and a coat of thin yellow powder dusting his blazer. There’s a faint whoop of victory in the distance, and Ten looks up, nervously, to find the woman gone, his best friend staring at him like he had grown a second head, and two strange-looking teenagers climbing out of a bush across the street.

He doesn’t learn their names until after they save his life. Yuta and Taeil are polar opposites, one a lean archer with a sharp tongue his aim would be jealous of, and the other a friendly, almost dad-like navigator with a penchant for patting people’s heads. They have saved his life, though, from something that Taeil calls a _monster_ with too much fatherly solemnity for Ten to doubt the seriousness of, and Yuta does not fail to seize the opportunity to gloat when he reenacts the notching of his bronze arrow and clicks his tongue to emulate the clean _swish_ of the shot, straight through the chest of one very peeved gorgon.

“ _Perfect_ shot,” Yuta corrects himself. “It was pretty much perfect.”

Ten learns that they had been waiting. Scouts, they called themselves, from some camp. They were here for Ten, and suddenly his mother “ _needs to have a conversation with you, sweetie, there are some things you don’t know.”_ Ten’s life is turned on his head, but he doesn’t mind, because his mother seems so excited to finally tell him what he is, and what he can become, and Doyoung just stares in dumbfounded silence as two big kids seem to actually want to talk to Ten.

There’s a story here, and it’s one Ten and Yuta will tell for a long time to anyone who will listen with tears in their eyes from laughing. _Like_ , they will recount, _we knew some of those costumers in Times Square were ugly, but to be a literal gorgon? That’s a new one._

But it’s his story nonetheless, and he is as fiercely protective of it. Maybe it’s not classical Greek drama, but it makes him one of the lucky ones: Ten ends up at Camp Half-Blood, young and blessed at age thirteen with an understanding mother at home anxiously waiting for him to come home during Christmas, newfound respect from the his best friend, the usually too-cool-for-school Doyoung, and a camp full of adventures to be had.

The day is a blur. He’s bombarded with new names and new faces, all of whom seem to be desperate to create a welcoming environment for the new camper. Ten finds himself in the Hermes cabin on his first day, feeling like he was trapped in a welcome whirlwind.

Ten is on the precipice of fourteen when he finds out. Three months at camp, learning the place inside and out, have passed in a blur. He has learned to spar, with a bronze _xiphos_ that Yuta had insisted would be too heavy, but balances now in his hand like it was made to be there. The Hermes cabin has become a second home, even though he knows that if he hasn’t been claimed by him by now he’s probably not a son. Most importantly, Ten doesn’t think he’s ever eaten better in his life.

He learns the history of the camp: what it had been “before the Battle of the Labyrinth” and “after”, as the older kids call it. He learns about the oracle, who is currently residing in the body of a “ _Ji Hansol, but don’t talk about it, because he hasn’t been around a lot lately. He’s working on some NGO, something to do with unity? We’re not really sure, but things have been good for a while, so there’s not really a need for an oracle,”_ a baby-faced Aphrodite kid explains to him. _He’s like ten, but he’s still handsome somehow, dammit._ He learns about the gods, the system of rule and their power, but also the type of things that happen to their kids. The lifelong harassment by monsters. The kind of down-low life they’re forced to live. The stigma that comes with their lineage, even though campers try to convince him that after the Battle of the Labyrinth there’s no more of that reputation.

He learns the camp intimately, in the way only a young teenager finding a new home can. He learns how to read the moods of the Ares kids, and is getting better at assessing ‘ready for human interaction’ mode, usually after a meal or after a good day of classes, and ‘I am the child of the war god mode and I will demonstrate that’ mode, typically early in the morning. He learns not to ask the Athena kids a question, even if they probably know the answer, unless he has an entire day to kill and the patience to listen to a several-hour lecture. The Hermes cabin becomes his personal home-away-from-home, and it serves it purpose with grandeur. Most importantly, he learns to be wary of the Hades cabin, the last of what Johnny calls the New Cabins, looming quietly over the center of camp like a warning.

Taeil, he learns, is a well-meaning, wholesome of Demeter. He’s the first to really talk to Ten about the whole “demigod” portion of things, and when Ten gets the tell-tale look of doubt in his eyes, Taeil sprouts a daffodil in the palm of his hand and tucks in behind Ten’s ear. “A flower for a flower,” he notes fondly.

“And Yuta? Who’s his parent?”

“He’s usually the easiest to guess,” says Taeil with an easy smile. “Have you seen that smile of his? Dude can blind you with his smile like the sun and then plant twelve arrows in you before you can even blink the spots out of your vision. He’s Apollo’s.”

Among this, Ten is genuinely and purely happy. It’s a certain kind of peace that he knows will do him good to last a long time.

Of course, it doesn’t.

It happens during his first capture-the-flag.

He’s anxious to be claimed. Though it hasn’t been a long time, Ten is getting restless from his sleeping bag on the floor in the Hermes cabin, and the others are beginning to talk, too. It isn’t until an even younger boy, Sicheng, who arrived only a week after him is claimed as a son of Nemesis at the bonfire one night that he begins to resign himself to a long wait. In sparring practice, he fights well with his _xiphos_ but can’t begin to develop his godly powers before he even knows what they are. New campers stream into the camp seemingly constantly. Ten meets dozens of new faces until he realizes that he’s now one of the more seasoned regulars among the masses sleeping on the floor of the Hermes cabin.

New demigods. They’re brought back by what the camp has dubbed mini-quests. The new initiative had been instituted by increases in monster activity all across the United States, as Taeil explains to him. “Too many demigods, too many monsters, and not enough missions to get them.” So a system was worked out, and demigods who had been claimed and had belonged to the camp for long enough made mission teams, and tracked hotspots of monster activity until they could bring another camper home.

“They’re not really quests, in the traditional sense of the word, because they’re not prophesied,” says Johnny, the head of the Hermes cabin over dinner when he asks. “They’re like quest starter-packs. Ones that are necessary, but we can’t be bothered to get someone to prophesize it, then turn it into an overly complicated poem, then deconstruct it so we actually know what to do.” Johnny gestures to the Hephaestus table, where a few kids are talking animatedly. “They figured out better ways to track down demigod activity years ago. The old way was kind of antiquated. People got hurt trying to come to camp on their own too much. This way is much smoother.”

It worked for him, because Yuta and Taeil are like overbearing parents to him. “We found you,” Taeil says proudly as he suits Ten up for his first capture-the-flag. “It means you’re our faithful protégé until we die.”

“That sounds terrifying.”

Taeil just pats him on the head and assures him that being protégé also means they’ve got his back during his first game. It isn’t long until he’s running through the woods, feeling heavy and bumpy by the weight of his armor against his back, adrenaline pumping through his veins.

He’s sent to scout, as most of the first-timers are. They’re not expected to last long, just to buy time to let the big kids come through with a real strategy, but Ten is feeling especially deft with his sword today, and he’s determined to do something that will make his godly parent, _whoever that old bastard is_ , he thinks, be forced to claim him after the game. So he hefts his Celestial bronze _xiphos_ a little tighter, and keeps making his way through the woods.

He stops when he spots the first ruffle of blue on a helmet through the tree line. Crouching down, his head starts buzzing with plans of attack. What had the cabin leaders told him earlier?

“ _Ten, you’ll scout along the left flank and move center a quarter of a mile in. Do not be seen, do not engage. Wait for us to come around, we’ll be center until someone can get around the back of their flag. Got it?”_

He _had_ got it. He had definitely got it, but his sword was itching in his hand, and he could tell that the guards of the blue team’s base were first-timers, too, just by the way they stood in a nervous circle. It would be so simple. A quick disarm, just a flick of his sword.

“Ten, solve world hunger,” he mocks Yuta’s commanding voice to himself. “Ten, find a cure for cancer. Ten, make Johnny stop hitting on me.” Screw it, he thinks. As much as he loved Yuta, it was time for Ten to be claimed, and it would never happen if he kept letting himself be passive. He makes to get up from his crouching position behind a tree. _Don't mess this up._

He moves, tragically, a beat too late. An arrow (rubber tipped, Taeil had assured him, but they’ll still bruise so be careful) comes whistling through the gaps in the tree line, and he ducks to flatten himself on the ground as it whizzes past where his chest had been seconds ago. It strikes some raised ground behind him, and clatters on the rocky ground.

Crap. He sees a rustle of a shrub in the distance, and he can see the curve of the archer’s bow protruding above the bush. He’s been seen, and he hadn’t even gotten to the first part of his plan. Suddenly, his bravery leaves him like a candle being blown out, and the warmth and adrenaline drains out of his chest. Ten can’t hear the sounds of the main clash, somewhere in the middle of the woods, anymore. His _xiphos_ is cold and heavy.

The archer wouldn’t touch him if he was going back, right? Breath catching in his chest, Ten scrabbles against the ground, not daring to stand up. Sword caught in one hand, he barely manages to stumble to his feet as he runs, runs with fervor away from the blue flag, still fluttering prettily in the wind.

His foot catches on something in the ground. He pulls away, but it pulls back. When Ten looks down, his foot and parts of his ankle are being encroached by something glittery and bronze. Ten almost cries out loud until he remembers the archer, and instead sinks to the ground and groans quietly in frustration. It’s a net trap, made by the Hephaestus kids. Yuta had warned him about them, but Ten had forgotten that they would be plentiful around the enemy camp. Harmless, but put another fighter out of commission for the whole game.

Except the trap isn’t meant for someone backing _away_ from the site of the flag, it’s made for someone going _towards_ it, so when the bronze nets wrap their way around Ten’s torso, they’re squeezing him wrong, and snaking around his chest in a way that makes all the breath leave his chest. The metal is _cold_ , and it’s getting tighter, and tighter, and the bronze filament of the net closest to his face is getting blurry. Spots dance in his vision. The edges of his world begin to blend into one. He can’t even find the words to yell for help. His head falls forward, still gasping as the mechanism snakes its way up his throat, it’s _wrong, all wrong._

There’s a moment of disgusting, weighty silence, when Ten doesn’t even feel like he can gasp anymore, and the air is bursting with silence. Then, through the bushes comes bursting another camper, and for some reason all Ten can think is _thank the gods he’s red team,_ and he’s seeing Ten’s choked face, and calling, calling.

“Kun!” the older camper yells as he rushes towards Ten. “Not part of the fucking game, buddy! Come fix your fucking trap!” Panic is laced through his voice, but all Ten can feel is cold fingers grappling at his neck as the camper abandons a bronze spear and a shield to pull fruitlessly at the tendrils of the trap.

The camper spots Ten’s abandoned _xiphos_ and immediately rushes to pick it up. He slashes at the webbing of the trap, but instead of the buttery _swish_ of the blade against rope, there’s a harsh clang of metal, and the camper swears again. “Hephaestus _bastards_ ,” he spits, “can’t fucking half-ass _anything_ , those assholes. Kun, you better be running here, you canary!” His voice is crazed now, and when he catches another glance of Ten’s panicked eyes, slowly being encroached by the netting, he drops the _xiphos_ and backs away, eyes wild.

“Gods, Kun can’t hear me. _Fuck_ , ok, I’ll be right back. Don’t panic.” And the camper sprints away, and Ten is tragically alone in the woods again.

The darkness threatens to spill over the edges of his vision, and even the netting in front of him swims. What a way to go in the first game of the year, he thinks vaguely. He knows he should stop, he’s seen the type of work that the Hephaestus kids can do and there’s no way he’s getting out, but his arms struggle against the hold of the netting anyway. What a sight it would be for him to give up. What a way to go. In the safest place in the world for demigods, without ever having been claimed, by the hands of a friendly game of capture-the-flag. A godly parent looking down on him now would be frowning, and instead of the thought making him struggle harder, he opens his mouth to gasp pathetically at the air.

Then, the panic sitting heavily in his throat is gone, and instead it is replaced by a dark, cold clarity that erupts from the bottom of his stomach like it’s always been there. He can almost imagine it filling him up, slowly at first, then the coldness reaches his eyes, and of course, it’s clear, why didn’t he just do _that_ to begin with? And the frigid darkness inside of him moves his line of vision, and like that, it’s so easy to give in to its power. So easy. It will protect him.

Ten blinks. He tastes metal. There is a deep rumble, the sound of earth moving, and the netting is falling away from his body. So easy.

The stillness should be a frightening force, but somehow it feels like it’s been living in him for the longest time. He just needed to wake up. He was so asleep before, he was. This was better. He was better like this. The cold pitch rising inside of him was better. He could trust it.

He almost walks away. He should get the flag, probably, he thinks to himself, and almost moves to do so when the frigid calm abandons him almost as fast as it had come to him, and he falls to his knees, sickened. It is hot, too hot, and bright, too bright. His head is pounding, and the ground is spinning, spinning, and it meets him like an old friend as Ten collapses on the dirt.

Jaehyun returns frantically with Kun in tow to find the scene different than what he had left. Ten, on his hands and knees, shoulders shuddering as he dry-heaves onto the dry earth. And around him, tendrils of bronze netting, limp and lifeless on the ground. And beyond that, perhaps the most perplexing of them all: the control mechanism of the trap, smashed into an almost unrecognizable form, by an assortment of boulders and rocks that only suggest one thing.

The remnants of a landslide.

 

It is a long, long time before Ten finds the courage to even raise his head back at the Big House. He’s seated in the infirmary, not really injured but definitely not really well, and the choke of the bronze net is long gone but he can feel the echo of the coldness in the back of his throat, and every time he is revolted by how it tastes.

Taeil and Yuta have refused to leave his side since the game ended. They sit across from Ten, but haven’t said a word since sprinting back from the woods, not concerned with the results of the games. They’re joined by Jaehyun and Kun, though, the latter of which won’t stop pulling at his hair and pacing back and forth.

“It shouldn’t have happened,” Kun keeps tells himself in a strange, strangled voice, “what did I do, what did I do.”

“Kun.” Yuta calls his name sharply. “Shut up. Sit down.”

Kun does not sit down. He does shut up though, but continues to wring his hands and walk back and forth. When Ten looks up, the four older campers all meet his eyes with sympathy. He looks back down.

“Ten, you need to tell us what happened.” Taeil’s voice is prodding but gentle, and Ten can tell that it’s a line of questioning that would not let up soon. He stares harder at the linoleum floor.

“Do you know what happened during the game?”

“No.” This is the truth.

“Ten, do you know how you got out of the trap?”

“No.” Truth.

There is a weighted pause. Then,

“Ten, there was a landslide. Did you know?”

“ _No_.” Truth.

“Ten, you have to work with us.”

“I _would_.” Ten can taste copper in his mouth. It is frighteningly similar to the cold, dark weight that he had felt not even an hour ago. He wants to cry. He wants to collapse in Taeil and Yuta’s arms and tell them about the darkness, the _power_ , he had felt in his chest. How it had scared him. But the feeling, no matter now threatening, was telling him something even louder now.

_Do not show them weakness._

“I _would_ ,” he repeats, voice small but hard, “ _but I don’t know._ I don’t know what happened in the woods. I don’t know how I got out of the trap. And I didn’t even notice a landslide.”

“Ten, can you be honest with us? Please. We want to figure out what happened so we can help you.”

“I don’t need your help.” Lie.

“Ten, you’re not okay.” Yuta cuts in. He’s less patient than Taeil. “Just tell us what you’re feeling.”

“I don’t know.” Lie. He’s fucking terrified.

“Well, you have to feel something, Ten. Please.” Yuta’s voice cracks.

A shift. A sudden breath of clarity. No more fear. Power.

“I _don’t know_. Stop asking. _The answer won’t change.”_

His voice is horrible. It is level and steady and seeps frost at the edges, and it is not the voice of a thirteen year old boy, who has almost just died in his first capture the flag. He _knows_ this. He can tell that his voice is cutting and sharp and _not his_ , and he can taste copper in his throat again so he looks up. Looks up at the older campers, two of who have been staring in morbid curiosity and two of whom, his brothers, his most admired seniors, now shocked into a stunned silence.

It is perhaps the look on Yuta’s face that brings Ten back to reality. It is the fear that is etched on his features that shows his age, his _real_ age, where Yuta is just another scared kid trying to figure out what is going on in a world still a little too big for him to grasp. It is the fear that makes him realize.

His voice. Ten had said something, and it had happened. In a split second, light had been sucked out on the infirmary, like thick paper towels soaking up water. It is pitch black in the closed room, like all the shadows of the place had spilled out of their homes and enveloped the place.

Ten holds the only source of light in the room. Ribbons of light seep out between the fingers of his clenched fist. and run to the floor like smoke.  He had done this. He had collected all the light in the room and taken it. Not collected. _Stole._ He had stolen the light.

He opens his fist, slowly, terrified. Tendrils of light drift slowly until light is flowing from the palm of his hand like fog furling across the ground. They return to their home around the room, restoring light to the place in no rush.

Before the room returns to normal, Ten sees a light, concentrated glow on the top of his vision. He glances up, frightened. A beacon glows above his head. A glowing skull pulses once, then fades. The room returns to normal, but Ten is feeling anything but.

By the time he has looked back to the other campers, the fear in his chest now thoroughly and entirely outweighing the allure of the power, there are no longer understanding eyes greeting him. He is faced with four bowed heads, _all wrong,_ he thinks. _Not them, they should never bow to me, I haven’t even been claimed, I’ve been at camp for like three months. No._ It’s all wrong. And then someone speaks, and Ten realizes what had just been recognized.

“Hades,” says Yuta. His voice is steady, but even Ten can hear the shaky undertones of fear. “Hail, Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul, Son of the God of the Dead.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. this fic is set in a timeline after the occurrences of the original percy jackson and the olympians timeline. I tried to keep all original names out of the story just for readability - this is strictly an au set in riordans universe but without his characters. I'll try to stick to this throughout the story but if it demands it this might have to change. 
> 
> 2\. I tried to keep the reforms to the camp minimal but I did include the change to the camp at the end of the last olympian where minor gods and hades all received cabins. this also means we get minor god parentage in this fic!!!
> 
> 3\. this is part one of a long story so don’t worry we’ll see the rest of nct in later chapters! 
> 
> 4\. in the pjo canon riordan focuses a lot on the physical power of nico di angelo - skeleton warriors, animation of bones, control over the dead. however, a really likely power of children of hades is strong manipulation of light and dark. this was explored a bit through the shadow-travelling arc of pjo but i decided that ten would be a very dark/light powered demigod just cause it would get interesting!! 
> 
> 5\. eventual taeten i promise we just gotta get there first 
> 
> 6\. jjh is a son of aphrodite because have you seen him. kun is a hephaestus kid, I felt like it fit pretty nicely idk


	2. sixteen

**Ten**

Ten’s first mini-quest is a little less climatic than anticipated.

Sicheng, who is a few months younger than him, is the one who first makes him remember. Sicheng’s sent on a mini-quest and returns toting a cute pair of kids, Renjun and Chenle, who cling to each other yet somehow resent each other in a way that only siblings can. It’s only natural when the pair, arguing too fast in a strange mix of languages for anyone else to follow, are swiftly claimed by Athena and move in without even seeing the inside of the Hermes cabin.

Ten would be jealous of how fast they were claimed, but he’s come to accept the type of person his father is, and that his journey to knowing his godly heritage was essentially given to be bumpier than most. Instead, seeing the way Sicheng had already begun to fawn over them, he thinks faintly: _oh, yeah, I should do that_. He had forgotten the allure of mini-quests that he had felt so strongly while he waiting to be claimed, instead, he had been so caught up in the activities at camp that the urge to leave had simply faded into an off-hand thought at the back of his head.

In retrospect, he thinks that his intentions to go questing as a fresh faced camper were perhaps a little misplaced. Just because he had dealt with one monster in the past meant nothing about the outside world, and his mentors at camp hadn’t been particularly subtle about letting him know this, either. The moment that Ten had stopped being considered a ‘new camper’ and fully leaned into his training was the moment that they had dropped the nice act during lessons and started teaching Ten about the way that demigods had to live.

“On your toes, constantly,” Yuta tells him one day in a sparring match. They’re circling each other, and while Yuta is noticeably better with a bow in his hands instead of a sword, he’s still a mean opponent. “It doesn’t matter who you are or what kind of powers you have. You have to know how to fight.”

Ten’s _xiphos_ is much more comfortable nestled in the palm of his hand than it used to be, but even the extra boost of power that he gets from the darkening night sky and the solid earth beneath his feet isn’t enough to make up for the advantage of experience the older campers have. Yuta had proceeded to kick his ass in the match, but the words remained true even though Ten was sore and bruised, maybe a little unnecessarily so.

“I’m not saying to go easy on me,” he grumbles to Yuta later, “but I could have done without the last round.” He got nothing but a blinding smile and a hair ruffle in return, and it was all he would get for comfort.

Now, he was sixteen, old enough to quest if he so desired. He fought, admittedly, better than he ever had, and could feel the development of ropey, thick muscle in his shoulders and back. With nothing in particular holding him back, Ten decides. _I’m going to to go find a damn demigod._

When he approaches Johnny to ask about mini-quests, Johnny looks up like he’d just been waiting for Ten to ask.

“Recruit an older camper to start,” he instructs almost lazily, “who’s been questing before. Try to mix up the houses. Oh, well, I mean, nevermind.”

“That’s it? No bureaucracy? No red tape? No favors?”

Johnny gives him a look, but there’s a flash of humor in his expression. “No red tape, Ten. And tragically, I got caught making kids do things for me before I would assign them mini-quests, so none of those either. Go find yourself a demigod.”

Ten asks Kun the next morning. He’s the ideal choice: experienced, older than Ten, and has the monster tracking down pat. His older brother had been the one who developed the technology, anyway, and Kun was more than enthusiastic to say yes.

Ten doesn’t mention that he chose Kun because anyone else with more raw godly power would make monsters flock to them like moths to a light, and Kun doesn’t ask, but it’s understood in the way that he accepts the position without question. Even so, Kun is a brother to Ten, and chatters comfortably the entire time they plan the quest. They're examining the large map plastered on the wall of the Hephaestus cabin, littered with pulsing magical lights.

“Red is monster activity,” Kun starts. “I set it up so the lights leave little trails where they've traveled, and if we triangulate them,” and with these words he moves a switch and slides a gear, “we can get a pretty decent map of where monsters are going and what paths they're tracking.”

There's an almost worrying spread of red over the map that Ten figures appears more scary than it actually is, because Kun keeps browsing menus and fiddling settings on the side of the screen, seemingly fine with the spread of crimson light over the screen.

Green lights then blink on, interspersing the red waves in much smaller, concentrated speckles. They’re correlated with the blurry lines that the red light makes, and create odd patterns across the map, winding lines that cross over each other sometimes.

“Mortal sightings of weird things,” Kun explains, doing air quotes around _weird things_. “There’s a search engine running out of the Athena cabin that scans all mortal news websites and pulls anything that sounds too weird to be explained by anything but demigod activity. It usually means a clash between a monster and a demigod. The location of the sightings are the green dots.”

“Did you guys _have_ to make it look like a depressing Christmas tree?”

“Yeah, well.”

“There are… so few.” Ten is astounded. “Why can’t all of them be found if there’s so few?”

Kun grimaces, and pulls his gaze away from the screen to look at Ten. “Most of them are young. Too young. But it’s part of the reason they _haven’t_ been taken to camp yet. If there’s monster activity but no evidence of clashes, it probably means that they just turned of age. And demigods turn of age all the time. More pop up even if we do have quests out. It’s just impossible to get them all at once. Like Whack-A-Mole, but a lot more life-or-death.”

The information leaves a weird feeling in the pit of Ten’s stomach, but there’s nothing he can do but continue to stare helplessly at the display. Each of the green trails represented a single demigod, probably scared, alone and in danger. None had been as lucky as he had, yet there was still so much more for them to go. What could he do but the job he volunteered to do, even however miniscule? Ten willed himself to focus on the task at hand.

“There’s been a bit of activity along the northern tip of Virginia,” Kun gestures, “that’s a pretty good distance for a first-time quest. Longer than a day trip, but won’t require any flying or anything. I’ll leave it up to you.”

Ten studies the screen hard. There’s activity all over the East Coast, but Kun is right, the Virginia activity seems the most accessible.

“Virginia it is,” he says out loud, “but if you think that it’s going to be more than a day trip, you’re sadly mistaken.”

Kun raises an eyebrow. “What are we, gonna take a _Greyhound?_ Monsters might be dumb, but I think they know how to work public transportation. Gotta be a bit more stealthy than that, especially considering you probably smell like a Thanksgiving dinner to them.”

Ten grins, and slings an arm around Kun’s shoulders.

“Oh, brother. Sweet, innocent brother of mine. I’m going to teach you about a little thing called _shadow travel._ ”

 

**Taeyong**

It’s only been three years since Taeyong saw the woman dressed as the Statue of Liberty explode into yellow dust across an intersection in the grimy streets of Flushing, New York, and yet he can count a lot of things that have changed since then.

He had gone home after that incident, he remembers clearly. Gone home with half a mind to tell his mother, even though he know how crazy he would have sounded. _Mom,_ he started, _I’m home._ That was as far as he got.

The front door to the house swinging open, unsecured. The acrid smell of things-that-shouldn’t-burn burning. Silence greeting him at the door like an old friend.

A storm rolling over the house suddenly, unprompted. Blue skies blocked by menacing darkness, sheets of rain obscuring visibility. A world blurry and foggy at the edges. Maybe that’s why what happened next is so surreal in Taeyong’s memory. His mother, soaked from the rain, ragged. Falling apart.

_Taeyong, baby, there’s something I need to tell you, please. Wait for me, okay? I’ll find you. Go. Go for now, just for now. This is only temporary, Taeyong. I need you to go now. Run._

A backpack shoved into his hands. Some money. Nothing else. It had been a different style of temporary than he had anticipated, because temporary usually meant that Taeyong would know when _temporary_ ended. But he was true to his word. And he had run.

From a park bench in Washington D.C., Taeyong watches as a clock ticks past 5:40PM.

Three years was not temporary. It was signal, a phrase with a sense of finality that meant that something, not _almost three years,_ something had been wrong for three years. His mother had told him to wait three years ago.

It was a rare moment of peace, but Taeyong allows himself it. Washington D.C. was not Flushing, and he could afford a beat of silence before going back on the move.

The thing that was chasing him was never far behind, after all. He tried to make it so it was like that, anyway. At least eight hours ahead of it. Enough for him to get a decent amount of sleep when he needed it, so he could haul ass the next morning and get ahead. At least eight. It allowed him these moments.

The thing. The _monster._ In all honesty, Taeyong had never looked at it, never fully. His mother had told him to run, and he had. So he never turned to fight, never stood his ground. He had been running for three years.

In the beginning it had almost gotten him a few times. The _thing_ . Something terrifyingly human and monstrous at the same time. He only knew its tail. Spiny. Poisonous. Hurt like a bitch. That was back when he wasn’t as smart. When he hadn’t figured out his magic number of _eight hours._ He had faced it twice, and it had almost killed him twice. He always remembered how it went. A spine in his chest. The second time, it had been two. The _monster_ encroaching on him. The smell of ozone. A flash. Coming to, hours later. He hadn’t experienced much pain worse than that, the coming-to. Winded, like he had been dead. But alive. Always alive.

He had been stupid. After the first encounter, he had thought it would stop. Maybe it would be dead. So he was risky. He ran, but not nearly as fast as he should have. It caught him again. He knew now. Never again. He could never stop running again.

It was terrifying. The powers that cursed Taeyong saved his life, but there was always the thought that it was them that he was running from. When his mother had told him to run, maybe she had forgotten that the real monster would always be himself. The powers kept him from dying, but they kept him from being really alive, too.

Was he a mutant? Was he really, really lucky, or really, really cursed? Was he a freak of nature, or a god among men?

It was 5:45. Slinging his bag over his shoulder, Taeyong gets up from the park bench and pulls his cap further down over his face. Not unlike the rest of the tourists in the city, he begins to walk. He could be in Maryland by nightfall, if he was careful enough and moved quickly.

It was time to keep moving.

 

**Ten**

Ten is really, really good at shadow traveling. Even without a reference point, like a sibling, he’s read enough about the previous sons of Hades and what they could do to figure that he’s probably pretty good. It wasn’t like anyone he knew could tell him he was _bad._

Melting into shadows comes surprisingly easy for him, considering that Ten is generally not the disappearing, stealthy type. He’s known among his friends at camp for loud entrances, clumsy locomotion, and an array of other behaviors that would not usually be classified as _sneaky_. But when the time comes, a cold sense of inner peace is surprisingly easy for Ten to summon into the pit of his stomach, and it only takes the split second between breaths to find himself solidifying out of the shadows at his destination.

Much to Kun’s chagrin, Ten decides that the best time for their journey to start is the next night. At dusk, finding solace in the darkness of their waypoints was much easier than in the daytime, especially considering their final destination. Ten’s chosen two waypoints, all a few hours by car from each other, that would take them from the Long Island Sound comfortably to the very tip of Virginia, in a neighborhood that Kun described as “surprisingly suburban.”

Kun is already yawning when the sun sets. He and Ten have a small pile of bags set up at the edge of camp, almost ready to leave when he hears a voice from across the small clearing they’re set up in.

“Ten!”

A tall figure approaches them, and it takes Ten a second to recognize Johnny jogging towards them holding a scrap of paper. He waves, and Johnny quickly comes up to them, huffing a little.

“I almost forgot.” He unfolds the sheet of paper. “You need a prophecy before you can leave. I got jurisdiction to give ‘em last year, when Dionysus got tired of writing them so often. Ready?” Johnny clears his throat.

 

“ _Go to the suburbs of Washington D.C._

_Find a demigod._

_Bring Johnny back_

_Some old-timey peanut brittle.”_

 

The moment the final words leave Johnny’s mouth, there’s a bursting noise, accompanied with a wisp of thin green smoke coming from the scrap of paper. Satisfied, he folds the paper and sticks it back in his pocket, giving the pair a smug smile.

“...Johnny.”

“Hmm?”

“You’re kidding, right?”

Kun rolls his eyes. “Don’t bother, dude. The first time I went on a quest, it was to Chicago. After sulking for a few hours because I didn’t choose him to come with me, he made the prophecy include instructions to bring him back enough deep-dish pizza for the entire Hermes cabin. Do you know how much of a nightmare that was to transport?”

“What happens if I don’t fulfill the prophecy?”

“You get smited down by the gods. Kidding.” Johnny chuckles at his own joke. “There aren’t any _real_ consequences, because the quests aren’t technically designated by the gods. But _I’ll_ smite you down, if that’s the answer you’re really looking for.”

Ten groans. “You couldn’t have at least _tried_ to make it rhyme? Ask Yuta to write ‘em, and you can just read?”

Johnny grimaces. “Yuta writes all his poems in Japanese. I’m sure they’re beautiful, but he got so tired of me butchering them that he refuses now, out of principle. Plus, there’s only so much prophecy that you can fit into a haiku. Not enough syllables to make people do my bidding.”

Kun nudges Ten’s side. “We got it, that’s all that matters. Ready to head out?”

Slinging his backpack over his shoulder, Ten grins in response. “I should be asking you that. Have _you_ ever dissolved into the spirit of darkness, and reassembled on the other side? I don’t _think_ so.”

“Let’s just get it over with, asshole.”

Johnny shivers. “Have fun with that, Kun.” He pulls a baggie out of his pocket, jingling and heavy. “ _Drachma_ , for Iris-messaging. Keep us updated. If you spend it on anything else, I’ll personally see that you pay me back double, because these are out of camp funds.”

Ten catches the baggie and slips it into his pocket. “Thanks, Johnny.”

All suited up, he reaches out to catch Kun’s wrist in his hand.

“See you later!”

Like every other time, it only takes the split second between breaths. Inhale. Camp Half-Blood, the setting sun, the smell of strawberries. Exhale. A chilling, dark clarity that washes over his shoulders. A shift in the air, ever slight. His feet on solid ground.

“Welcome to the city of brotherly love,” Ten says brightly. “Home of the Liberty Bell, the Phillies, and a vast span of the colonial history of the United States. Enjoy your stay!”

“Gods,” chokes Kun. He retches, and the sound of him puking echoes through the quiet streets of the city of Philadelphia.

 

**Taeyong**

Shit really starts to go wrong when Taeyong hits Silver Spring, Maryland the next morning.

D.C. had been good to Taeyong. A lot of public space meant that a disheveled teen trying to find a place to sleep during the night wasn’t too strange. A few hours of sleep on a secluded park bench, a little out of the city and into suburbia. The park has a statue of some old white guy in it, and the inscription says he represents freedom and liberty. Taeyong sleeps facing the statue, just to spite it. Moving along after that. A gas station along the highway had been good to him. It was a shame the city was dead to him now.

Because that’s how it went for him, wasn’t it? Wherever he had gone he could never go back. He had learned that the hard way, when he had forayed out west to Chicago. Spent his eight hours in the city. Made a mad dash out to Geneva. Tried to go back. Almost died.

There had been more than just the one _thing_ there. There were others. Different ones, all after him. They never managed to even lay their eyes on him, but he knew that they were out for him. Roaming the city. He never turned back. Now, he thinks that there could be a chance that he could go back somewhere. That maybe it was a coincidence that they had appeared after he had gone through Chicago. But the second encounter with the monster had reminded him.

No second chances. You get once to learn lessons.

This is a new lesson, though, in Silver Spring. It’s a split second too long spent rifling through a wallet, not his, for enough money for a hot shower at a gas station and maybe a meal. It’s a blur of adults yelling, debating, fear. A hand on his wrist. _Who are you, how old are you, where are your parents. Lee Taeyong, seventeen, I don’t know._

Taeyong knows that kids like him, without parents, go into the system. Kids without real homes, real parents, real places to spend the night. But kids like him who also steal things? They go into _holding cells, detainment,_ not _prison,_ because only adults go to prison. To Lee Taeyong, seventeen years old, it’s a death sentence.

He begs. _Please, I can’t stay here, you have to understand. I have to go, I have to keep going._

The cell in Silver Spring Police Station is small but bright. He gets a meal. He eats it, because he’s been on the run too long for his instincts to allow him to waste a meal. He waits. There is a clock in the cell. He goes into the cell at two forty-three in the morning. He leaves the cell at eight thirteen the same day. Five hours and some change gone. Two left. He has been in Silver Spring too long. He has to leave, he has to leave, but there are some adults who say they are here to help Taeyong, they want him to sit down and talk about his feelings. They want him to tell them what is wrong and how they can fix it. Taeyong doesn’t know what is wrong. He has never know what was wrong, _but,_ he tells them, _I can tell you how to fix it. Please let me go. You don’t understand. Please._

At nine, he tries to run. He doesn’t get very far. His mad dash for the door earns him a pair of handcuffs around his wrist, attached to a desk in the police office. He sits back in the hard chair they have given him. He waits.

Eight hours is a good estimate. At ten twenty-one, three years and one day after Taeyong sees the woman explode into yellow dust across the intersection in Flushing, New York, the monster catches up him for the third time.

 

**Ten**

The quest is, as described by Kun, “remarkably uneventful.” They don’t stay long in Philadelphia. In a normal situation, Ten needs time to recover from the distance they had just crossed, but in this case it seems like Kun needs it more. Ten just pats his back as Kun empties his stomach onto the uneven grass of the park they’ve landed in.

“Believe me, I felt the same way the first time.”

It’s true: Ten’s first shadow travel hadn’t been exactly successful. He had been fourteen, and had read about the process in the attic of the Big House for hours before even daring to try it. He is alone in the Hades cabin, as usual, and it was past lights-out. (He was the head of his own cabin anyway. _I’d like to see someone try to stop me._ ) He collected all the light in the room into the palm of his hand, a skill he had mastered now, formed a small ball, and tucked it away under his bed so the room was completely black. He positioned himself in a corner of the room. Then, a pause. Inhale. Exhale. A cold darkness rose in his throat, still scary but more controllable than it had been before. _Dissolve._

He was focused on the opposite corner of the room, concentrated so tightly that he could see its image burned into his eyeballs even with his eyes shut. It started in the palm of his hand. First his fingertips, becoming more and more familiar with the darkness. Then the rest of his arm, dispersed into the darkness.

By the time he’s realized that something will go wrong, he’s already too far gone into the shadows to stop. He can’t even cry out before he’s completely pulled into the darkness, and it’s only then that he realizes his mistake of stealing all the light from the room. To an outsider, there is a split second of nothingness before Ten falls out of the shadows on the opposite side of the room, but to Ten, it’s a terrifying moment of confusion and darkness, unsure whether he could ever apparate back into his world.

It took him a few days of nausea and crying in the infirmary to get him back to full strength, but he would be wary of shadow travel for months afterwards. Only then did Ten recognize the first unwritten rule of shadow travel. Never in complete darkness. He was a demigod, after all, with a foot in both worlds. He was not a creature of the darkness, and would never belong to it. The light grounds him, keeps him from dissolving completely into his father’s realm.

All in all, Kun is forced to begrudgingly accept the efficiency of shadow travel. They’re almost halfway to their final destination without much trouble at all, and with the map of monster activity, Ten is able to pretty easily pick waypoints that are be safe for them to stay, even if just for a little. Within a few hours of wandering the streets of the suburban area, although everything is closed for the night, Ten eats two granola bars out of Kun’s utility backpack and is feeling recharged enough to close a decent chunk of the rest of the distance.

(“You didn’t tell me it would be _this_ easy,” complains Kun. “I have enough supplies to get us to Florida and back by foot, and we could be back with the kid by _tomorrow.”_ )

This time, Kun is much more ready for the impact, but still drops to his hands and knees when the pair melts out of the shadows and into reality in Baltimore. With the consecutive distance, Ten is winded and takes a second to blink some spots out of his eyes before straightening up and observe their surroundings.

It’s another park, and they’ve landed not even a few meters from where Ten had imagined in his head. _All right._ But even Ten admits that he’s done for the night, and wouldn’t be able to get them anywhere for at least until the next day, after some sleep. Luckily, Kun is prepared for this much, and is already pulling supplies from his utility backpack. A flat pad of Celestial bronze cloth expands into a camp that’s roomy for two with plenty of room for a third.

Just before the sun rises the next morning, Ten is feeling especially _corporeal_ (“So fucking pretentious,” murmurs Kun), and ready to make the last jump. The duo emerge out of the woods behind a shed, Kun only slightly green, and find themselves in a well-manicured lawn occupied by no one but a fat old beagle, who pays them no mind.

They’re almost zeroed in on the hotspot of monster activity. The pulsing red waves on Kun’s handheld map lead them into a sprawling park (“You’re getting predictable, Ten,” remarks Kun), where a group of middle schoolers - none of them older than thirteen - are playing soccer. Kun gestures at the group.

“Most likely it’s one of them.”

“Really? A kids’ soccer game?”

Kun’s voice is serious, and Ten can’t tell if he’s joking or not. “The most normal situations have the highest likelihood for shit to go wrong.” Ten can’t argue with that.

It must be a Little League tournament day, because there’s an almost alarming amount of parents stacked like sardines on a set of metal bleachers. Adorned with varying styles of ridiculous sunhats and massive bug-eye sunglasses, most of the moms seem to be quietly chatting among themselves and sipping from Thermoses. The dads wear huge cargo pants and generally seem bored.

Ten does a quick scan of the rest of the park, but there’s not much activity besides the game. They settle in the grass on the shady side of the bleachers, trying to appear relaxed but keeping an alert eye open all the same. The game continues without incident.

Kun and Ten don’t bother to shoot the breeze, instead focusing their efforts on being ready. Kun sets his utility bag behind Ten and discreetly sets a few contraptions on the ground. They lie flat to the ground and are almost invisible in the tall grass, except for the occasional flash of light off their bronze backs. He fiddles with the backpack more, and they suddenly scuttle off in an array of directions.

“Failsafes,” Kun mentions conversationally, to maintain the appearance of normality. “Should contain any noise or disturbance to this area, no matter how the encounter goes. Just in case.”

Nothing happens for a while, but the first hint of trouble is a sure one.

“Dude.”

“What?”

“Do you see that mom? That one, the one standing up.”

A woman from the bleachers has risen and is pacing along the sideline of the game. She’s adorned with a massive head of blonde curls that burst out of a obnoxiously pink sunhat. While this would usually render her unintimidating, Ten can feel chills run down his spine when he sees her pace along the side of the field, eyes sharp under the shadow of the hat.

A referee blows a whistle, and play stops for a moment, but the woman keeps watching the game closely. The ref makes a call, makes a hand gesture, and signals for the game to continue. The woman is obviously displeased with this.

“Hey ref!” Her voice is grating and nasal, and Ten can only watch in horror as the scene begins to unfold before his eyes.

“What the hell was that call? Was the sun in your eyes, or are you really blind?”

Ten and Kun look at each other with wild eyes. The audience is amazingly unbothered by the yelling, and even the referee seems ready to shake off the comments. The game continues, but the pair of demigods are on the edge of their seat. Ten watches carefully as the woman continues to pace. Was it just his vision, or was she walking oddly? A heavy step on one leg, and a half-limp?

“Hey ref! What, is Sharon sleeping with you, too? Is that why you seem so keen to make her kids’ team win?”

Ten almost rises, but Kun pulls him back with a hand on his wrist.

“Not yet.”

“But there’s no way that _thing_ is a real soccer mom.”

“Not yet,” Kun repeats. “We have to be sure.”

The woman turns to march the other direction down the line of the field, and her strange gait is even more obvious from this angle. Ten forces himself to stay put, but from his backpack he readies his _xiphos_ and waits.

There’s another call in the soccer game, and it sets off the woman again. “What the hell kind of call was that? Have you had as much white wine as I have?”

The ref seems to finally take some dim notice of the woman, and walks over the speak to her, obviously not noticing anything out of the ordinary. Instead, she storms onto the field, strange lope even more obvious with the speed. “I didn’t climb my way out of Tartarus just to join the PTA,” she yells, “and I certainly won’t just wait around making passive aggressive comments to Jessica about her _crap brownies at the bake sale!_ I will not be disrespected at a soccer game like this! _”_

The woman is still walking, but there’s a shift in her air around her, almost like a black and white image suddenly coming to life in color. It was as if she had been pixelated and blurry, and in an instant, she was in crisp high definition. One step, a middle-aged mom wearing sensible shoes and wielding a Michael Kors bag. The next, a terrifying figure with one leg of an animal, one made of copper, and a column of fire for hair. An empousa.

“Soccer moms,” Ten says. “All monsters inside.”

“ _I came,_ ” says the empousa, voice horribly deep and grating, “f _or demigod blood._ ”

Her image is terrifying, but only one person on the field seems to have noticed. A small kid with dark brown hair backs away, slowly at first, then faster, from the monster approaching him. The fear in his eyes is visible, and he looks up helplessly for anyone for comfort, but his teammates are unbothered. The empousa is gaining on him.

The kid lets out a yelp. And vanishes.

Ten looks at Kun for confirmation, but he’s already on the move, an edge in his eyes. “Now.”

 

**Taeyong**

One moment, he is handcuffed to a desk in a police station in Silver Spring, Maryland. The next moment, he is still handcuffed to a desk in a police station in Silver Spring, Maryland, but there is a monster and it has destroyed half the office.

If there’s a positive side to this encounter, it’s that he finally sees what he has been running from. He had been right about the tail; it was massive and spiny, and reminded Taeyong of the pain of having one (or two) planted in his chest. Its body, a huge, muscly lion’s build, but with a disgustingly human face. In a moment of lucidity, Taeyong thinks that he was right to be as afraid as he has been in the past three years.

But his hands, literally, are tied. Running is impossible. _Sorry, mom._ When it pins him, he does not flinch. When it calls him _demigod, I can smell your father’s blood in you,_ he does not respond. When it lunges, Taeyong smells ozone. He feels the electricity running through his veins. Feels the sky shake with anger. He has done this before.

He comes to in a park, which he laters finds out is almost two miles from Silver Spring Police Station. All the hair on his body is standing up, and doesn’t settle for hours. His entire body is smoking gently, simmering off into the acrid sky of the morning.

Three years and two days. Three times, now, he should have died, and didn’t. It was time for answers. All roads lead to home. He would get his answers where it started. He was going back to New York.

 

**Ten**

After the fight in the soccer field, Kun and Ten are left with a stunned audience of parents and a confused group of children, who are wondering what happened to the strange angry lady. The kid, who has reappeared, stays close to Kun’s side, unsurprisingly wary of all the adults in the area. Ten is reveling in the glory of his victory, feeling pumped up and excited. He’s still chatting amibly to Kun, _did you see the feint I pulled on her,_ when he realizes two things. The first is that he is still covered in yellow dust. The second is that he has about thirty middle-aged parents staring at him in a sort of stunned silence.

Ten makes eye contact with Kun, but Kun only jerks his chin urgently towards the bleachers in a way that says _I don’t know either, you come up with something._ Ten clears his throat, and gives a high, awkward laugh.

“Uh, hi parents!” he starts. “Welcome to-” He pauses and leans over to Kun to whisper furiously _what is this neighborhood called again_ to which Kun replies _Loudon,_ and Ten repeats it louder.

“Welcome to Loudon County High School’s annual Drama-In-The-Wild performance! What you have just witnessed is a performance mimicking staged melee, done by me and my good friend, uh, Leo.”

“We used, uh, paper mache to create the facade of a monster that was then destroyed by my friend here, uh, Nico, representing the battle of nature and mankind,” Kun adds, catching on. “My, uh, little brother here-”

“Jaemin,” the kid supplies quietly.

“Jaemin, has been working with us to help put on a great show! We hope you enjoyed!” Kun says with a false sense of cheeriness.

“We are taking donations-” Ten adds, but is cut off by a smack on the arm by Kun, who gives the audience a simpering smile. “My apologies, we are _not_ taking donations.”

Back at camp, Jaemin had been taken in like a baby chick at the Hermes cabin, even though Kun already had a good guess of his godly parentage. “Don’t tell him,” he says as the pair observes him meet a group of campers, “but that disappearing act? That’s a Mist power. My money’s on Hecate.”

Ten decides that Jaemin is a cute kid. He’s already worrying keen on doting on him.

“Kun,” he whines. “He’s so _cute_. I just want to pat his head forever.”

“I know, right?”

Taeil and Yuta are no better, with Taeil almost shedding a tear when Ten and Kun return to camp with Jaemin in tow. He’s so excited to greet the trio that when he runs up the them, crossing the barrier to camp, he leaves a tiny patch of flowers in each of his footsteps. “Our protégé has a protégé,” says Taeil faintly. “I’m officially an old man.”

Johnny demands his peanut brittle right away, and Ten is happy to pull it out of the bottomless pockets of Kun’s utility backpack. “I took a quick solo shadow-travel to Williamsburg to get this,” he snipes, “so you’d better enjoy it. It was _not_ fun trying to get Iris to help me change _drachma_ to dollars.”

The monitor room in the Hephaestus cabin is as hectic as ever, but it’s as champions that the duo returns to the digital map that encompasses an entire wall of the room. The patches of red signals in Northern Virginia have almost completely disappeared, to the elation of both the boys.

Kun is fiddling with a few gears, switching around the filters at work on the monitor. He shows Ten a version of the map that uses blue instead of red, signalling places where the camp has allies around the United States. There’s one with faint orange lights, which Kun explains maps Labyrinth signals underground. He’s turning a gear again when a screen comes up with red and green lights, just like the original monster activity map, but this one has a key difference. Just a little west of Camp Half Blood, another part of New York is lit up like a Christmas tree.

“What’s this one?” he asks, and Kun, who had been looking at another screen, looks up. He sees the monitor and quickly changes it, the map shifting back into the more familiar version of red and green.

“Nothing,” Kun says quickly. “Same map, just without a few filters.”

“Why are you filtering results?”

“Oh, no reason. Readability, I guess.” Kun shifts a little uncomfortably in his seat.

“Can I see the first one, then?”

Kun sighs, but flips the gear back to the old display. Ten was right: the screen was almost exactly the same, except for a giant, bright red mass of light centered on Flushing, New York.

“Flushing? _I_ was found in Flushing, shouldn’t that signal be gone?” It almost obscures the entire area.

Kun runs a hand through his hair, as if trying to word something in the most careful way in his head. “We’re not really sure why it’s there,” he admits. “If there was a demigod, there’d almost certainly be evidence of a clash with monsters because there’s no way a demigod who hasn’t even been claimed can control their powers and fight well enough to not cause an accident in the mortal world.”

“But it’s in Flushing. What’s the likelihood there would be another one in _my_ neighborhood?”

Kun sighs. “Listen, Ten, I’m not sure I’m supposed to tell you this. But here’s what the Athena kids have been telling me. There wasn’t anything huge in Flushing for a long time. Normal activity. When you came to camp, that changed. My brother noticed it first, actually. The moment you came to Camp Half-Blood, there was a peak in monster activity that would usually evidence another demigod surfacing.

Then you were claimed. Flushing has been hell ever since. Monster activity there hasn’t let up since, the most I’ve personally ever seen. The only real explanation is your godly parentage. We haven’t had a son of Hades in who knows _how_ long.

I’m not sure if anyone has told you this, Ten, but you’re probably the strongest demigod alive right now. And monsters, chasing that trail, have made the place uninhabitable for anyone but mortals.”

Any demigod, no matter how powerful, even trying to go near Flushing would practically be suicide.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. this would have been posted earlier but the taeten vlive Killed me and i had to take a break to come back to life  
> 2\. if im writing the rules of shadow travel a lil wrong plz forgive  
> 3\. why yes i DID grow up in suburban america hOw can yoU tell  
> 4\. to clarify the monster tracking thing - the chb canon system is changed so that instead of how scouts join the lifestyle of the demigod, demigods are tracked down before they’re in any real danger and taken to camp  
> 5\. thAnks for the love on the first chapter, seriously,,,,,,,,,, i read every comment, leave me one if u enjoyed!!


	3. seventeen

**Taeyong**

_Queens,_ Taeyong thinks, _is somehow even more depressing that it was when I left._

Perhaps he’s biased. He almost laughs out loud at that sentiment. Being biased against the place that did what it did to him was as natural as prey avoiding its predators. Every fiber of his being was repelled from the place, and the-three and-some-change years away had done nothing to resolve it. The replaying of the events of that day in his head enforced it day after day: this place was poison.

He’s not too far off the old neighborhood, but it’s getting late, closer to a time when he’d prefer not to be labelled a strange teenager wandering around in a suburban area. Instead, he veers off to a well-lit gas station, whose cold fluorescent lights are almost a little comforting, and scrapes together a handful of change from his pocket.

The attendant is a bored looking middle-aged man, and he barely looks up from the _Maxim_ magazine on his counter when the bell on the door rings and Taeyong steps inside. He’s got enough money for some random packaged foods, and is blearily staring at the racks of crappy energy drinks when he hears the bell on the door ring, and a multitude of obnoxious voices stream in.

 

“Hell yeah, let’s get ICEEs!”

“Have you been watching your sugar like Brenda’s been asking, Paul?” asks another voice.

“Shut the fuck up, man, do you _see_ Brenda here now?” replies Paul.

“Fuckin’ chill, guys,” says a third voice, “let’s just get our shit and leave. Got places to be!”

The first voice chimes in again. “Fuck you mean ‘places to be', dude, we’ve been hanging out here for weeks now. Don’t act like you’re not getting tired of waiting too.”

“Yeah, well, we’re all here for a reason. And everyone wishes that _reason_ would show up sooner rather than later.”

 

Something in the way the last voice talks about waiting for something runs a shiver down Taeyong’s spine, and he tries to shake off the paranoia, telling himself it’s just the feeling of being back in his shitty hometown, but the growly laughter that follows a stupid joke one of the guys makes tells him to quietly leave the gas station without kicking up a fuss, and are those _hooves_ he can hear clopping against the linoleum of the minimart’s floor?

The group moves through the store, voices clambering over each other, but Taeyong is approaching the register as inconspicuously as possible. He puts his food on the counter and taps his fingers on the table anxiously as the attendant seems to take his sweet time ringing him up. He mutters a total, and hands shaking slightly, Taeyong drops a few crumpled bills and a smattering of coins into his hands.

He had made it this far, hadn’t he? Living, and on top of that, somehow getting back to New York. It was too late to take risks with the progress he had made. As the attendant counts the money, Taeyong strains his ears to listen again to the low voices of the men in the store with him. He manages to catch snippets.

 

“ _-been here for fuckin’ months, Brenda’s not happy, can tell ya that-”_

_“-some guys down by the library thinkin’ about unionizing, I don’t know about all that mess but it-”_

_“-goddamn demigods, fuckin’ with my job stability-”_

 

And there it is: that word. The word that came out of the first monster’s poisonous mouth had followed him, and it is with this Taeyong knows that he is trapped.

 

“It _stinks_ like demigod in here, god damn.”

“This entire town does. It’s nothing, it never is.”

 

The cashier moves to hand Taeyong his receipt, but the moment their hands brush he jolts, suddenly, making Taeyong jump too, but the cashier laughs it off.

 

“That’s quite the shock you gave me, there,” says the attendant amiably, chuckling and shaking his hand. “Like you got electricity in those skinny hands o’ yours.”

 

Taeyong is nervous, ridiculously so, so that he can hear only the sound of his heart thumping wildly in his chest, the low buzz of static around his ears, and the muffled voice of the cashier trying his best to make small talk. But with his brain filled with too many sounds to process, he manages to notice the distinct silence of the group of men who had walked into the store after him.

He prays he is mistaken. He takes the handle of the plastic bag from the cashier, hoping his hands are more steady than they feel, and turns to leave the store when he sees that tragically, undoubtedly, he had been right.

Three men, _wait, definitely not men,_ whispers his brain, and Taeyong blinks a few times to realize that the towering figures that now stand between him and the exit are not, in fact, men, they are horses, oh wait, yes, they are men, but only half of them.

A part of him wonders _when the fuck did centaurs become real,_ and a part of him is screaming internally, but most of him is thrumming with electricity. _Again._ He was less than a few months out of the disaster at Silver Spring, and it was happening again.

This time was different. For a number of reasons. These were different monsters, first of all, which meant that not only did one monstrosity of God have it out for him, seemingly _all_ said monstrosities did. Another reason? The instances were getting closer together. Potential for a spiral. Could be his _life_ now. The last reason? The last reason was that it was _here_ and _now_ and suddenly, three years, four months, and thirteen days of suppressed grief, anxiety, and paranoia come crashing down on his shoulders in heavy sheets of rain.

 _I am fucking tired,_ he thinks, _of whatever-the-fuck-these-things-are getting in my goddamn way of answers._

The centaurs don’t seem too keen to move out of his way. So be it.

In all honesty, that’s all it really takes. Maybe Silver Spring broke him. Maybe he had been broken a long time before that, but this time, this instance, this fight is different. He’s angry. Taeyong rarely allows himself to be angry, because anger would have had him dead in a ditch in Richmond a year and a half ago, but he allows himself this. Today, anger gives him power.

He doesn’t shy from the three figures leering over him. Instead, Taeyong reaches up slowly, pulls his hood off his head, and looks up to meet them in the eyes.

 

“Excuse me.”

 

Silence. Stillness. He almost laughs.

 

“I’ll just squeeze past you there-” he makes a move between the flanks of two of the centaurs, “sorry, excuse me - woah, that’s a lot of fur, _hello_ , sorry, excuse me, thank yo-”

 

He gets so far past them that he almost falters, thinking they should have stopped him sooner. His hand is resting on the metal handle to the door of the minimart, but sure enough, as he’s almost past the tail of the far right one, there’s a hand on his wrist and a cold metal point in his back.

 

_There we are._

 

**Ten**

Ten’s mother is not a worrying woman. She had sent him off to Camp Half-Blood almost enthusiastically, and hadn’t been one to helicopter over him in the years he’s been away. If Ten couldn’t already tell how much she loved him by every other aspect of his life, he probably would have been a little hurt with how little she seems to worry about his health and well-being.

He gets an Iris-message from her at 3AM. Understandably, it freaks him the fuck out.

She’s lucky he’s still awake. Only a few minutes ago he had stumbled back into the Hades cabin after another long night sat in front of the screen in the Hephaestus cabin, Johnny and him only being able to find common time to work on the program after all lessons and camp activities had ended for the day. He had collapsed in bed when he heard his mother’s voice from the corner of the room, masked by the tell-tale fuzziness of an Iris-message.

“Ten?”

He’s only barely awake as he answers the call, but the fear in her voice snaps him to attention. The tiny mist generator in the corner of his cabin isn’t ideal, and their connection is shaky, but he can hear her fear loud and clear, masked also by the torrential downpour of rain he can hear pounding the house.

“Ten, honey? I hate to wake you up, but I wasn’t sure who to tell, and I’m really not sure what’s going on, but-”

“What’s going on?”

Ten’s mother steps out of the frame and lets the backyard come into focus through a window. It’s a little blurry at first, but when Ten moves closer, feeling the mist settle on his nose, he can just make out dozens of small gray lumps littering the usually pristine patio of his childhood backyard, lit only by a porchlight.

“Mom,” he asks, apprehension rising in his voice, “what are those?”

 His mother steps back in frame, grimacing. “Dead squirrels. A flock of Stymphalian birds settled in the backyard last night, and they killed any living thing that was here before them. The neighbors are convinced that  it’s their pesticide that’s killing them.”

 “Stymphalian birds? Like, the flesh-eating birds that stop at nothing to sink their beaks into demigod flesh?”

“Can you name any _other_ type of Stymphalian bird?”

“Ok,” he says, mostly to himself. “Ok. Anything else weird spotted? Anything that the mortals can’t really explain away?”

His mom takes a deep breath, as if thinking. “I haven’t seen the birds anywhere else in town. They’re sticking around, even though the weather’s been strange. They hang out in the trees, a-and just watch me.”

There’s a hollow squawk in the call, an ominous sign of the birds outside, and Ten can see his mother hide a cringe.

 “Mom,” he starts, panic sinking in,  “what in _Hades_ going on?”

“I don’t know,” she says in a small voice, “I really don’t.”

 

**Taeyong**

He gives the centaurs the liberty of freezing when he feels the tip of the knife in his back, but only gives them a moment of silence before he breathes in, out, one, two, squeezes his eyes shut, and blows out the windows of the gas station in a shattering explosion of falling stars.

His trick had worked, thankfully. It was an untested technique that he had come up with after Silver Spring, noticing the insane heat on his skin when he had gone off indoors for the first time. A flash of his power heating up the indoors in a split second, then lurching forward and opening the door ever so slightly to let cool outdoor air in. Boom: no more windows, and a very satisfactory distraction to allow him to twist out of the loosened grasp of one of the centaurs, out of the range of his knife, and go sprinting into the parking lot.

It’s a cheap ploy, and he knows it: it would only give him time to run, and no way to fight. He’s not far when he hears the whistling of an arrow through the air, giving him only a second to think, oh, _fuck_ , and no option but hit the floor sliding when a thick rope wraps around him from the back, pinning his arms to his sides and his heart to his throat.

Embarrassingly, he’s face down on the pavement when he hears the slow clop of hooves approach him. He can’t seem to wiggle his way into a fetal position, or even just on his side, so his nose is pressed painfully into the pavement. Thankfully (he’s starting to get a little grossed out by the kind of shit he’s been _thankful_ for lately), a centaur plants a hoof into his stomach, causing him to writhe in pain, but it at least sends him tumbling onto his side rather than on his face.

Four times. Three years, four months and thirteen days, and he will have faced monsters and barely escaped with his life four times. He can already hear the electricity crackling around his ears, and feel the warning buzz of static around his arms, but very suddenly, there is an unmistakable smell searing the inside of his nose, and the sound of liquid hitting the pavement to his left and right.

 “Electricity, huh?” croons one of the centaurs. “So you’re one of _that_ bastard’s?” He laughs. “So fucking pretentious, all of his. _King of the Gods._ Go ahead, smite us down with lightning if you want. But if a fire starts,” and here he pauses, only to revel in his words, “I can’t say _I’ll_ be responsible for the gas tanks lighting and taking down this whole block.”

 The plastic gas container clatters onto the pavement. _I’m finished._

 

**Ten**

On any other day, no one would catch him. In fact, he had thought about it dozens of times before: leaving his otherwise unoccupied cabin late at night, standing away from the torchlights (but not too far away) and simply leaving camp by turning into shadows, and finding himself somewhere else.

He never really got to as far as where ‘somewhere else’ was. Not ever. Because for all the fantasies he had had about leaving the camp and finding something else for him in the great world, it had never happened. People didn’t just abandon their homes like that. And yes, unquestionably, Ten wouldn’t abandon his home like that. The call of wanderlust was much quieter when he was surrounded by friends, his camp family, and the place he had most belonged to in his entire life.

Maybe his fantasies would come in handy today. He knew exactly how to walk through camp to make the least noise, avoiding the sand arenas where his footprints would be obvious, making a margin around the forest to not disturb the nymphs. It was a perfect plan, of course, on any other day.

 “Ten?”

 He whips around, almost choosing to disappear right there, when his eyes land on the confused figure of Johnny, standing a few meters from him. He looks like he’s about to fall asleep on his feet, but looks at Ten with a mixture of worry and intensity.

 “What are you doing?”

 There’s no point in lying. They would find out eventually. Maybe it was better that someone knew where he was, too. Just in case.

 “I-I got an Iris-message. From my mom. I’m j-just going to check on her, nothing big-”

Johnny doesn’t let Ten’s intentional omission slip past him. “Ten, your mom?” His eyes widen. “ _Flushing?_ Are you _fucking insane?”_

“No- listen, something’s happening there, something _weird_. I’m just going to check on her, please, make sure that she’s ok.”

He straightens. “Let me go with you, then.”

“I don’t have _time,_ ” Ten hisses in frustration, “I shouldn’t have even stopped to talk to you, I need to leave yester-”

Johnny catches his arm. “Can you think? Can you just fucking think, for one minute? You know the risks. You know what you’re doing.”

“I have to go. You would too, don’t tell me otherwise.”

“I would plan first. I would take reinforcements. I would _look for another way._ Please, Ten.”

He shakes his head, slowly. “I have to go.”

Before the shadows leak out of the edges of his vision to obscure his sight, he can see Johnny looking away.

 

**Taeyong**

From where he’s tied, he can hear the centaurs moving around, speaking to each other in low tones that he can’t catch over the roaring of blood in his ears.

If anything, and this is the smallest of small blessings, they don’t seem inclined to kill him yet. They seem to be perfectly content with allowing him to lay like a useless beanbag on the pavement while they take care of their own business. He can’t help but feel a little disrespected.

They were right, though, those bastards. He is essentially powerless laying in a puddle of gasoline, head turned skywards as much as possible to avoid the fumes overpowering him and rendering him unable to think on top of unable to move. The powers he had been given were so easily made useless. _I cannot believe I ever thought it might have been a blessing._

He blinks once, and there is a figure, clouded in darkness but visible, barely visible.

 

**Ten**

He appears, of all places, under the sign of a Shell gas station that he faintly registers as being a few blocks away from his mom’s townhouse, and outside of the Flushing proper. It’s a bit disorienting, considering his mind’s eye had been focused on the familiar front step. But he’s smart enough to realize at least he hadn’t plunged himself straight into the belly of the beast by traveling there.

 _That’s weird,_ he thinks. _I’m usually better than this._

The advantage of it being his hometown, however, means that it’s a familiar and quick walk to his mother’s house, which he completely intends on making when he wheels around on the spot and almost marches into a horse.

No. It’s not a horse, it’s a dude. Wait, no, it is a horse. Oh. It’s a horse-dude.

 _Centaur_ , supplies his mind helpfully.

It takes the shock of his close encounter for him to finally realize that _sometimes, his mentors and teachers were right, and he might really have to survey situations before marching into them._ He ducks down into a conveniently supplied bush and holds his breath as he scans the parking lot.

A figure is crumpled on the ground, clearly restrained with a thick rope and sitting a large puddle of some liquid, which the burning of his nose quickly confirms to be gasoline. Around him, obviously unconcerned with their captive, circle three centaurs lazily. In the distance, more figures that he assumes to be _dracanae_ by their strange stride. The aftermath of their struggle is clear in the splay of shattered glass around the windows of the gas station mini mart.

There are a few options for Ten here, but the one to ignore the situation and shadow-travel to check on his mom seems dishonest now that’s he’s observed the situation. Now, the situation lies between two possibilities. The first: the figure was a mortal, and the monsters were sorely misinformed about the type of damage they could do to mortals. The second option, which seemed more and more likely and unlikely as he thought about it, was that the figure was a demigod. One of theirs. And he was in serious danger.

Thankfully, he has remembered to grab his _xiphos_ before slipping away from camp, and wields it now, confidently in one hand.

The night sky is forgiving, but the light of the stars and moon still provide a decent cover of light to the people on the scene - foes and allies alike. Ugly fluorescent light pours out of the broken windows of the mini mart, and the gas prices flicker dully in red LED lights above him. Just enough for him to take.

He raises a hand out of the bush. He steals the light from a city block of Queens, New York into the palm of his hand, and slips it into his pocket.

 

**Taeyong**

It’s not even darkness. Taeyong has been in the _dark_ before. It’s blackness. It’s a blanket of the stuff, forcing its way down his throat and making him dizzy with disorientation.

Panic. He’s actively struggling now, even though he can hear the calls of the monsters around him, signalling that he hasn’t gone anywhere, and they’re just as blind as he is. It’s a deprivation of the most severe manner, and he almost cannot breathe without it.

Against his will, he feels it. The panic in his chest builds, and with it, the electricity running down his arms and through his fingertips. _No_. Not here, not now. He couldn’t.

He squeezes his eyes shut, as if it would protect him from the darkness pressing down on his chest and weighing him down. He had to calm down. He couldn’t go off here. He wouldn’t be responsible for it.

Then he hears it. It feels like it should be muffled, with the blackness pushing into his ears, but it’s clear, and it’s worrying close to him: the sound of metal clashing on metal, the unmistakable sound of a struggle, hooves and footsteps and the same. The sound seems to move around him, and he can only struggle harder against the bonds, and feel his heartbeat pick up, and feel the tightness in his chest, and then it is too late. He can hear static in the air and taste ozone, and he realizes that the electric charge he has been fighting through is about to discharge.

He screws his eyes shut, and feels it go off on the surface of his skin, like his panic and fear escaping through his pores.

Instead of the usual explosion of light, heat, and sound, Taeyong is suddenly and not kindly pressed into the pavement by a wave of force. It’s as if the light from the electricity’s strike and the all-encompassing blackness struggled against each other, resulting in a blast not unlike that of an underwater explosion. It shudders outwards, but the explosion he anticipates never comes. The darkness, however unforgiving, has smothered not only his electric powers but the potential for a flaming disaster and a destroyed city block.

It kind of pisses him off. _Useless._

 

**Ten**

He’s almost proud of himself. A clean steal, all the light sliced out of their surroundings like the cut of a sharp pair of scissors through a sheet of paper. He’d had less successful attempts before. A perhaps unnecessary but poignant demonstration of dramatic effect.

The light he’s stolen goes immediately into a special pocket on his bag. Made specially by Kun, it keeps the light contained, if he can get it small enough to fit in the pocket, without letting anything leak. He is just as invisible to his enemies as the darkness made them to him, but what he has that they don’t was the power to control it.

As the light cuts from the scene, there is it: the seventh sense. Ten’s imposed darkness comes with a useful trait: a sort of omnipotent viewpoint on the area from which he holds the light. He describes it to his peers at Camp Half-Blood as not being unlike Toph’s vision through touch, from _The Last Airbender._ Though unable to cast particularly wide, it gives him a play-by-play map of his surroundings.

What he senses isn’t ideal. There are monsters - more than the centaurs and the _dracanae_ that he had seen earlier. _Empousai_ coming in from the east, and not just a few. Their convergence on his location wasn’t a coincidence. The figure, in the puddle.

He was a demigod.

Like he said, he was _almost_ proud of himself. He can sense the figure on the ground begin to struggle, likely as affected by the darkness as his enemies. Then he explodes.

 _That_ was new. People didn’t generally explode when afflicted by Ten’s powers, but it was the unmistakable crackle of thunder churning in air that only confirmed Ten’s suspicions. People didn’t generally have _electricity coming out their bodies_ either. And although stunted by the blanket of darkness, Ten can tell that something much worse could have happened if he hadn’t scooped up the potential for disaster and slipped it into his pocket earlier.

The Athena kids had been wrong. Kun had been wrong. _He_ had been wrong. There was another one. Another demigod. And it was up to Ten to bring him home.

_We’ll call it a one-man quest, for a powerful and unpredictable demigod, in the most dangerous place in the country for anyone non-mortal. Here goes nothing._

The darkness had served its purpose, and the monsters were significantly confused, the centaurs calling out to each other in ringing, panicked tones. 

Again, he’s _almost_ proud. Hell, even the little blip with the exploding boy wouldn’t usually be enough to make him not proud of a good light steal. _Almost_ only really turns out to be a caveat when there is a suddenly a point to his throat, and cold scales pressed against the line of his jaw.

“What hubris it must take to think that you are the only child of the darkness,” comes a low hiss in his ear. The _dracaena,_ he doesn’t know _how_ he missed her sneaking up on him, holds the tip of a spear to the soft spot under his jaw, snakey limbs planted strongly around him. Trapped.

But not immobile. He panics, just for a split second, which is fortunately all he needs. Then his right arm, wrist caught in the slender, pale hand of a snake lady, jabs backwards to elbow himself.

 _Oof._ He hits himself a little too hard in the side, loses a bit of his wind, and feels really stupid for a second, but generally accomplishes his goal: he hits the pocket. The light pocket bursts open, and he’s learned to time this perfectly so he’s not looking at it when it happens. Of course, the _dracaena_ doesn’t know this. She reels back, wheeling from the concentrated explosion of light, which quickly returns to its rightful place in the night sky.

It was a one-time trick, and Ten knew it, but he was ready now. _Xiphos_ in his hand, he can see, really _see_ , what he’s facing, and it’s not pretty. Whatever stealth shadow-traveling had given him was gone, because there is a decently sized group of monsters facing him, and they don’t seem keen on giving him a second to catch his breath.

 “Who is he,” he manages to say. “Who is he, and why him? What do you want with him?”

A centaur throws back a deep laugh. “Like flies, they told us,” he replies, “and they was _right_ . One trapped under our boots, and more will come. Two of _theirs_ , who would’ve thought!”

His eyes narrow, and he hefts a menacing bronze spear in his left hand. “We’ve been waiting.”

 And then they charge, and Ten forgets to think for a while.

It was bound to happen. He takes down a _empousa_ with a careful parry and a quick slash of Stygian iron, but it was bound to happen. It was bound to happen in a few steps: a slip of his back foot. A bad stab with his sword that throws his balance. The sheer number of attacks he’s defending from.

It’s bound to happen. In Flushing, New York, the most dangerous place in the world for demigods, Ten is struck down, first by a blow to the shoulder, then by a bad shot to the knee. And then there is darkness, but it’s not his, and it’s not the kind he knows how to control.

 

**Taeyong**

He feels himself go off, once, twice, but there are blinders on his vision, and he lets it happen. Electricity pulses through his skin, and he feels it gather in the pit of his stomach. _Let it._

When he sees the boy go down fighting, it’s like watching a great injustice that he can’t affect.

Taeyong forgets how he gets out of the ropes. All he remembers is that it had been easy. Easy, now, when he was in this state. _Rage_. He would know, wouldn’t he? The fighting boy. He was what Taeyong was. Cursed in the same way. Blessed in the same way. The boy didn’t run from what chased him. He would have the answers. He had to.

He’s small, now. Almost laughably small, lying the way he is on the ground, looking broken and unnatural like a fallen doll. Not moving.

He isn't thinking anymore. There’s no room for thoughts right now, so for now, he is lightning running down his spine, he is static filling his ears and throat, he is the quivering of electricity in the palms of his hands. There would be time to think later.

 

**Ten**

A flash of a blinding light. A boom of thunder. Static, crackling around his ears.

A figure. Standing above him in the fading dust. The softness of fear held in his brow, but jaded hardness in his jaw. Lightning in his eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this was a real bitch to write. hope you enjoyed


	4. seventeen, part two

**Ten**

He doesn’t remember much about what happened. Obviously Taeyong does, but Ten isn’t about to ask about it, given that he’s not even sure of the extent of the other boy’s powers.

He remembers going down. He remembers lightning. He remembers telling Taeyong, only half-conscious, about a safehouse he knew, a few miles away from the gas station.

 

**Taeyong**

It had been a weird night. Taeyong had been lucky the boy was smaller than him, because he had practically dragged him most of the way to the safehouse early in the morning, only arriving, exhausted, around six in the morning. When they arrived, the safehouse was a single cot and not much else. He had attempted to dump him on the bed, injured as he was, but he was strangely insistent.

“Le-lemme stay on the floor,” he had mumbled, only half awake. “Ground better - yeah.”

After that, Taeyong’s not really sure what to do. If he wanted to stay on the ground, he wasn’t about to argue with him. The boy didn’t have any major injuries, and even if he did, he would have no idea how to treat them. He passed out almost immediately.

He’s out cold for about three minutes, in which Taeyong can only sit in a stunned silence, gears in his head churning, when he starts to hear chewing. When he looks down, the boy is still lying down, eyes shut and all, only there’s what looks like a square of a brownie in his hand, and he’s eating it without even bothering to sit up. Strangely, though, it’s as if every bite returns a smattering of color to the boy’s cheeks, as if he’s being reanimated by the food. 

“Don’t ask,” the boy mumbles. “There’s a whole spiel I gotta do on this, but I’ll do it tomorrow. Just - for now, my name’s Ten, and I gotta get some sleep.”

Taeyong gets about another three minutes of silence. Then,

“It’s soooooo hot in here,” comes a voice from the ground. “You’re like an space heater.”

“Are you going to fucking sleep?” Taeyong snaps. “Or are you going to gripe while I wait for you to wake up, except you haven’t even gone to sleep?”

“Can’t you like, turn yourself off? Actually, never mind.”

There’s a beat of silence, then the sound of rock scraping against rock and earth moving. It stops, and Ten sighs contently on the floor. To Taeyong’s amazement, where Ten had previously been lying on a packed earth floor, a slab of smooth stone has erupted out of the ground to form a odd-looking cot.

“Marble,” he coos, “nice and cool.” And then he’s out like a light.

Like he said, it was a weird night.

It’s a while before he realizes that he is, in fact, burning up. His skin emanates heat like hot pavement. He forces himself to sit outside the camp for a few hours to let himself steam off in the dark sky, and by the time he goes back in, the room is significantly cooler. _No windows in this room to bust,_ he thinks, and it makes him laugh a little, in the sadistic, sad way. In all honesty he’s surprised he’s not more tired.

The gas station had been the greatest explosion of his powers, by far. Whatever had driven it - panic, fear, or even the desire to confront his first sign of clarity in two years - had gone out with a vengeance. When the smoke cleared, there wasn’t much to be said about the monsters in the area. That being, there were none. He hadn’t made an effort to look, of course, but something had changed in the air. It was stiller, calmer, almost like when a noise becomes so constant it blends into ambient, then suddenly stops. It was a clean slate for Flushing.

He wakes up Ten by punching him in the shoulder and giving him a sniping remark about leaving him to watch all night. It was the least he could do: if Ten had been anyone else, Taeyong would have made sure to be long gone before he even woke up.

“Urgh, what time is it?” he gurgles from the ground. Taeyong’s already busy packing his camp gear into his bag, but takes a moment to look outside and squint at the sun.

“1:00 PM. You slept for a whole day. I’m not sure what system you’ve been running on, but mine is about an eight hour cycle. It hasn’t really failed me so far- well, except for an incident in a police station in Maryland, but-”

“Fuck’re you talking about, dude? Every eight hours?” Ten sits up from his position splayed out on the floor of the camp. “This is gonna sound really confusing for now, but this safehouse is charmed against monsters. Magic and shit that I don’t really get. We’ll be fine here. Gimme another hour, then we can get some breakfast or something. I have, like, twenty bucks in my pants.” He yawns, and slumps back onto the ground.

Money? Besides the miniature camp that Ten seemingly pulled out of his ass, he had money, too? There wasn’t a doubt in Taeyong’s mind, now. Ten didn’t look to be much older or younger than him, yet he had this whole system down to a T. He must have been on the run for way longer than _two years_.

He doesn’t seem keen to get started for the day, either. There must be something he knew that Taeyong doesn’t. And so begrudgingly, and besides his every instinct screaming that his buffer time was ticking away, Taeyong sits back down. And keeps watch. And waits for the strange boy to wake up.

 

**Ten**

Ten has met his father a handful of times, more than most young demigods at the ripe old age of seventeen can say, and he can definitely say that there’s a difference between a “god-like aura” and a “god-like appearance”. Because he’s _felt_ the power emanating from his father’s gaze on him, weighty and thick, but he can _see_ the ancestry of something more-than-human in the sharp lines of Taeyong’s jaw, the curve of his shoulders, the high rest of his chin. There is a shaky confidence in the way that his eyes cast downward over their meal, and Ten is almost taken aback by the defiance he can still see burning in Taeyong’s eyes.

It’s the face of a fighter. Perhaps more importantly, it’s the hallmark hardened nature of a demigod.

 

**Taeyong**

Over breakfast, Taeyong finally dares to ask.

“How long have you been gone for?”

Ten looks up. “Oh, I left, like, yesterday night? Well, it was more of morning, but I didn’t think I would be staying up.”

Two days?

“Sorry?” Taeyong prods, after a second. “You’ve been running from monsters for _two days_?”  

“Camp,” says Ten, cautious, “I left _camp_ two days ago. That’s where we’re heading after this. Er, actually, maybe, like tomorrow. Or the day after.” He takes a bite of his stack of waffles. “I was kinda hoping to see some old friends in the neighborhood. Ooh, we can go to my mom’s house. You practically denuclearized the whole neighborhood, at least for a few days. It’ll be nice to go back. Been a while.”

Camp. An organization. He tries not to imagine a _Mad Max_ -esque camp of runaways and hooligans, but the only image he can come up with is face-painted outlaws, all with strange powers. There were more of them. There were more like him, like Ten, like Taeyong.

Who was Ten, really?

“I’m gonna need you to back up a little.” He narrows his eyes. “Who are you? What is this camp?” He almost adds _what am I,_ but decides it’s a little heavy for a breakfast conversation.

“Hold on,” says Ten distractedly. “Is this _butter_? Since when does butter look so much like ice cream? Here, does this look like ice cream to you?” He gestures at his plate of waffles. “Un-fucking-believable.”

Taeyong says nothing. He feels like silence would be a better buffer than anything he could have said in this instant, and he’s right, because Ten looks up from his plate during the beat of silence and seems to remember what he was dealing with.

“Oh, yeah, sorry. Chittaphon Leechaiyapornkul, but never call me that, Ten for short. From a few blocks away from here in ol’ Flushing, New York. Fifth year camper at Camp Half-Blood, located on the beautiful Long Island Sound. Son of Pang, senior associate at Lee & Lee Law Firm, and Hades, the god of the Underworld. Hold on.”

Ten abandons his knife and fork and reaches into his backpack, into which an alarming amount of his arm disappears into. He digs a little bit (ok, now it wasn’t just a deeper-than-appearing bag, he was practically about to fall into the thing), and comes up with a crumpled purple glossy pamphlet with green lettering on the front.

“So You Learned You’re A Demigod,” Taeyong reads, “What To Do And How To Process Your Emotions.” He slaps the pamphlet on the table. “What the hell is a pamphlet supposed to explain about what the fuck just happened to me?”

Ten rolls his eyes. “I told those bastards these weren’t going to work,” he mutters to himself, reaching across the table to grab the slip of paper, “but _no,_ they insisted on having a shitty outreach program. Ok,” he returns to normal volume, “here’s the deal.”

“Greek mythology. You learned about it in school, if my Common Core knowledge is right, probably in around seventh or eighth grade. A long story short, because you’re probably going to get this a lot faster than the younger kids, all of it? It’s real. The twelve Olympians? They’re real, and one of them is my dad. One of them is probably your parent too.”

“My mom? No way, she’s just a-”

“Then it’s your dad.”

“I-I don’t know my dad. I never knew him.”

“Then it’s him for sure. I said they were gods, not good parents.”

“Who is he?” Taeyong’s voice catches a little on this question, but he forces it down and makes himself listen.

“I don’t know. Well, I have my guess - I always do - but I think I’m going to let this one figure itself out.” Ten eyes him a little warily. “You’ll find out soon enough. They always do.”

“This morning. The gas station. The darkness. Was that you?” He tries to keep the shudder out of his voice.

Ten nods. “A Hades power. Power over light. Ability to manipulate earth to some extent. Minor power over spirits and dabbling in temporary reanimation of skeletons, although from what I’ve read I’m not that good at those last two in comparison to previous Hades kids. The light, though,” and he pauses a little, “that one’s mine.”

Taeyong is silent for a moment, and Ten takes the opportunity to fill the silence.

“I know it’s a lot to take in at first, and honestly, no one really believes me until they get to camp. If I was fuckin’ Taeil or something - he’s a son of Demeter, got the whole plant thing going for him - then I could, like, grow a daisy in my hand or turn the ground into ivy. Not sure if this Waffle House would really appreciate the blackness of the Underworld, though, or skeletons breaking through their nice linoleum floors. When we get to camp, you’ll believe it for-”

“I believe you.” Taeyong interrupts him. “I believe you.”

He takes a deep breath, then continues. “Do you know what I’ve been running from for two years now? Because I don’t. I didn’t think anyone would know. I didn’t think anyone would believe me if I tried to explain it. But this?” He looks up to make eye contact with Ten.

“This is the closest I’ve gotten to an explanation. So I believe you. I fuckin’ hope it’s true, and I’m going to feel like a real dumbass if it’s not. But for now, I don’t have a lot of options but to believe you.”

Ten seems surprised, but not disappointed. He sit back in his seat a little and regards Taeyong with a sort of cool appreciation. “Camp Half-Blood. It’s for all half-mortal children of the Olympians. We train there, to defend ourselves from these types of incidents, learn to hone our powers. Lots of half-brothers and sisters, just like us. That’s where we’re heading.”

 

**Ten**

After he pays for their breakfast, satisfied and a little food-happy, the pair leaves the restaurant. It’s a surprisingly nice day in Flushing, but Taeyong seems to shy away from the sunshine and wide expanse of sky, preferring to huddle in the swathes of his hoodie.

“So,” Ten begins, “I was thinking we’d start with my mom’s place. I can’t imagine the Stymphalian birds are still in her backyard, considering the stunt you pulled in the gas station, but it wouldn’t hurt to check-”

“This camp of yours. We can go there? It’s safe there? No monsters there? Shelter? Food?” Taeyong interrupts.

“Yeah, but I don’t really think tha-”

“Let’s go. To your camp. Anything to get out of Flushing. Now.”

Ten cringes a little, and shuffles his feet. “Actually, I was, uh, thinking we would stay away from camp a bit longer?” It’s not a question, but it turns into one.

“Why.”

Ten makes eye contact with the sky, and rubs his hands together. “Uh, I’m kind of, uh, how do I say this? In trouble? I’m kind of in trouble. At camp.”

Taeyong’s eyes widen. “What kind of trouble? Will they leave the monsters kill you when you return? Exile? Disownment?”

“No- not that kind of trouble, not like anything actually _bad_ , just like me, and this older camper, who I kind of didn’t listen to, and he, uh, might be pissed when I get back. At me. Pissed at me.”

There’s a beat of shocked silence, and then Taeyong speaks, incredulity seeping into his voice.

“There is a camp. Where we’ll be safe and not hunted and can stay for a long time. And we’re _not_ going there.”

“Okay, _well,_ when you say it like that of course it sounds bad but-”

“Because _you’re in trouble.”_

“Listen, have you _met_ Johnny Seo, dude is a real-”

He’s cut off, honestly rather rudely, by the outer side of Taeyong’s right forearm pushed into the soft part of his neck, and cold brick to his back. He’s pinned against the wall, and frankly, is too shocked to fight it off (even though he definitely, _definitely_ could). Taeyong still smells like gasoline. He speaks low and fast, and there is not a shred of kindness in his voice.

“Three years, four months, and fifteen days. All of which but for two days I have been _alone_ for. That is how long I have been on the run. I have stayed in the same place for more than eight hours three times in that time. Every time, it caught up to me. We have about forty minutes left. So please, _very kindly_ , if you know a place where I can have the fucking _luxury_ of not constantly _fearing for my life,_ I would like to go there. Very much.”

He gasps a little, not on purpose, and Taeyong leans off his windpipe to allow him to speak.

“Yeah, ok,” he cedes in a high tone. “Yeah, we can go back to camp, sounds good, my dude. Don’t gotta fuckin’ _kabedon_ me.”

Taeyong seems to sit back on his heels a little, and this time, it’s Ten’s turn to grab at him. He chooses the wrist of Taeyong’s left hand, dangling vulnerably at his side, and wraps his hand around it.

“In fact, we’ll go right now. Usually, I’d take regular transportation, for the sake of our new camper, but I’ll make it quick, if you’re _so insistent_.”

Taeyong barely has time to meet Ten’s eyes before he feeds Taeyong his greasiest smirk, tightens his grip, and dissolves the two into a mess of shadows on the sidewalk.

 

**Taeyong**

He can’t say that he hasn’t learned anything, at least. As unhelpful as Ten was, he’s learned a lot about him. Firstly, and most importantly, Ten is a royal asshole.

“ _Shit_ ,” he chokes out. He doesn’t even have a chance to register where he is and what surface he’s puking on before he, unfortunately, is puking on it. His insides feel like they’ve been liquified.

Ten is forging ahead, and through blurry vision, Taeyong can see where he’s heading. They’ve arrived on a hill, peaceful and sloping and absolutely opposite to how he feels in this instance.

“ _Asshole_ ,” he sputters. “What the fuck just happened? What was that power? Where are we? ”

“Uh, shadow travel. Second answer, also shadow travel. Kind of a dissociation, reassociation kind of deal. I wouldn’t worry about it too much, you’ll live. And we’re at Half-Blood Hill! The entrance to the greatest place on earth, and your future home!”

“ _Fuck_ you,” he manages. Then he’s collapsing on the grassy hill.

 

**Ten**

“What the fuck, dude. One job.”

“Okay,” Ten wheels around to Johnny, “technically this wasn’t a job, because I didn’t go out for that sole purpose. And technically, I haven’t failed, because he’s back at camp.”

“Yeah, but _unconscious._ Very few requirements, Ten.”

He doesn’t bother replying to that comment. He’s not wrong, but how was Ten supposed to have known that shadow travel would put Taeyong out like a light? It hadn’t happened ever before. Even Kun was kind of a wussy, and had made it through several jumps, staying conscious the entire time. What was _up_ with this kid?

He runs his hands through his hair frustratedly. “I swear, Johnny, he’s one of the strongest I’ve ever see. Maybe _the_ strongest. There’s no way this is normal, shadow traveling wouldn’t just put him out like this.”

He narrows his eyes. “I can’t pin him down.”

 

**Taeyong**

Ten is very, very loud. He and another voice are arguing, and he has half a mind to sit up and tell him to shut up, so Taeyong can go back to sleep for few days, but that would mean that Ten would know he was awake at all. And although he wanted nothing more than to collapse back into a pile of sheets and mush on the bed, he would have to confront the situation eventually. So he pulls his chest up off the bed, looks around foggily, and lands on the two figures on the other side of the room, now both looking at him.

Ten elbows the other boy in the ribs. “ _He’s awake_ ,” he stage-whispers.

“ _No shit_ ,” he replies.

Taeyong registers, vaguely, the room around him. It’s an infirmary, obviously, sterile and very white, much more than he’s seen in a long time, if he’s not counting that one weird neighborhood in Virginia. The cot he’s on is on wheels and a little scratchy and flimsy, but it’s still inviting. He doesn’t feel as shit as he thought he would, which is surprising, but he also doesn’t know how long he was asleep for. Still, he makes eye contact with Ten, carefully wearing his driest expression.

“Taeyong,” says Ten cautiously, “this is Johnny. You remember, right? I mentioned him to you.” 

“I remember.”

Ten is about to say something, but Taeyong interrupts him.

“You _also_ mentioned,” he begins scathingly, “that I am, in fact, awake. Which is strange, because I don’t quite remember _passing out in the first place_.”

Ten winces with guilt, and immediately begins to backtrack. “Okay, well, I’ll admit that was unplanned. Not part of the procedure, I promise. Really, it’s not. But-”

“You feeling good enough to talk to us yet, buddy?” Johnny cuts in smoothly, and moves to sit on the edge of Taeyong’s cot, but it only takes a raised eyebrow and his most scorching stare to have Johnny rethinking his choice.

“Sorry, sorry,” he says hastily. “Used to having new campers be a lot younger than you.” He clears his throat awkwardly. “Talk to me anyway, though. Where you’re from, how old you are, why you think you’re here.”

Taeyong starts with the day he went home and found his house empty and his mother gone. It doesn’t raise any emotion; it hasn’t for a while. He takes them through two years: starting with the day he found his mother gone and his life turned upside down, following through with his first encounter with the monster, his second, his escapes with his life.

It’s kind of a sad story, he guesses, but he’s told it so many times in some capacity that the emotional part of it doesn’t really affect him anymore. Instead, he cringes a little every time Ten and Johnny meet eyes, silently communicating something about the part of his story he’s on. Their pity isn’t unwelcome, but it’s unfamiliar, and it gives Taeyong a worrying feeling in the pit of his stomach.

The third encounter, the choice he made. The last encounter, finding Ten.

He only gets interrupted once. “Hold on, every _eight hours_? You were able to calculate it? Like, cyclical?” Johnny isn’t accusing, just astounded.

Taeyong nods, slowly. “More or less. Each time I waited too long it was - that, what did you say it was? A manticore. It would find me.”

Silence. Then, Johnny, quietly.

“I’m not sure what your godly heritage is,” he begins slowly, “but if I’m right, and I think I am, then there’s a reason they were able to find you after only eight hours.”

  
Meeting people is exhausting.

His first mistake is deciding to get out of the cot. He’s stayed up all night talking, and the morning sun peeking through the window reminds and presents him with an opportunity. The moment his feet hit the linoleum floor, though, and he’s vertical, he regrets everything.

The second mistake is putting on the stiff orange Camp Half Blood shirt that Ten tosses him to replace the tired old flannel he’d been wearing for a few months now. The last one is leaving the infirmary and finding himself in the center of a humble summer camp, full of fresh faces and curious kids. He’s forgotten how hard it is, especially considering the two years of relative solidarity, to meet new people. Peoples’ faces blend into each other faster that he can pin them down.

He gets the tour from Ten, even though he has lessons to teach during the day. Ten calls him his protégé, which Taeyong immediately puts a stop to, but lets Ten guide him anyway. He fills each silence like water running down a drain. It’s almost a little too easy to let Ten talk away and just follow him in dumb silence. Every few minutes, or after introducing something big, Ten whips around to examine Taeyong’s expression carefully. He keeps it neutral, because in all honesty, he _feels_ neutral. It’s like reading the exposition to a fantasy novel: everything is weird, and unfamiliar, and truthfully really really scary, but he figures it’ll all make sense once the story starts. Once _his_ story starts. He asks questions here and there, but instead of learning anything new, he finally begins to understand.

The only time Ten seems to really get serious is when he gestures at the three largest cabins, two of them grouped in a smaller circle of twelve and one off to the side, at what Ten calls the new cabins.

“The Big Three,” he says, seeming a little nervous. “Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, my dad. The most powerful Olympians, who make the most powerful demigods. There aren’t many of us.” He gives Taeyong a side-eye. “Not many at all.”

Things fall into place, not all at once, but little by little as he sees the camp: cabins for the children of gods, rooms full of mythological artifacts, lettering in Greek that comes to him shockingly easily. He’s shocked at how little he is shocked _Yes, this is how things are supposed to be. This makes perfect sense. This is where I am supposed to be._

Ten keeps expecting to blow Taeyong’s mind. Taeyong keeps expecting to wake up.

(“ _You’re_ a head of a cabin? _You_?”)

(“Don’t be so surprised. I can be very responsible when I want to be, which is very often because I am an extremely reliable and responsible person. Also there were no other candidates but that is not important.”)

Before they enter a particularly menacing appearing set of barracks, lined with rows of plated bronze chest plates, Ten pulls Taeyong for a sidebar.

“I’m running sparring practice in ten minutes,” he says, “and you should be there. Not a big deal - just take some of the basic gear here, suit up and join the group inside. I’ll take it easy - just for your first day.” And with that statement, Ten disappears into a mess of campers and practice gear, leaving only faint and vague instructions about getting to the sparring pit. Taeyong is left with nothing to do but what he’s told.

The sparring pit is large, but the attitude of the entire group of campers dampens the moment Ten comes in and tosses his bag to the side, not unlike the all-too-familiar blanket of darkness Taeyong’s seen Ten produce before. The effect is similar, and the group quiets and faces him, desperate to not step on his toes.

He had changed, clothes _and_ demeanor. He was wearing a black tank top and training pants, matching the stark black of his hair to make him look more menacing than his personality would suggest. But now, until just ten minutes before, Ten’s chin is held higher, eyes narrowed. His shoulders are squared, and he holds an intimidating black blade in his left hand. He radiates coldness, and when he speaks, it’s only confirmed.

“Ok,” he starts. “We’re sparring today. Two lines. One at a time. When I disarm you,” he says, and there’s an _if_ hanging in the air that no one dares to say, “move to the back of the line, and someone from the other line comes up. No pauses. We stop when I say.”

Taeyong immediately forgets Ten’s promise to take it easy on him, and shuffles into line with the other campers. Ten is a natural leader, and his voice is commanding and sharp in the ring, miles different than the friendliness of earlier.

He watches Ten fight. It’s not even a match, but the campers try their hardest. The longest spar lasts only a little over a minute, with a camper taller than Ten is left with her sword skittering across the ground. He hasn’t even broken a sweat. Ten moves like a dancer when he fights, his footwork being almost as important as the clash of his sword against his foes. He is a different man than the one that he had seen earlier that day.

“Step forward, Taeyong.” Ten’s voice is even more frigid when he calls to Taeyong, making him startle a little. “On your toes. Be ready.”

It’s his turn, and he hasn’t even noticed. He hastily raises the sword, but it’s awkward in his hand and too heavy. _Of course it’s too fucking heavy_ , he thinks to himself, _on account of the fact that I have no idea what the fuck I’m doing, and I’ve spent the last three years running and not fighting._

He moves into the center of the sparring pit to face Ten, but his cautious and skittish step gives away his inexperience more than anything. It takes only a few motions: a defensive move by Taeyong that fails miserably, the point of Ten’s sword by the hilt of his, the sword leaving Taeyong’s grasp to clatter on the hard packed dirt.

“Pick up the sword.”

Confused, he moves to pick up the sword, and starts to shuffle to the back of the line, when Ten calls out again, this time louder.

“Taeyong. Again.”

Again?

He turns around slowly, and finds Ten meeting his gaze, eyes unforgiving. He gives an exaggerated look of exasperation, and gestures to the position in front of him. It’s clear what he’s communicating

He goes to fetch the fallen sword. He gets back in position to fight. He is quickly disarmed again.

“Again.”

“What are you _doing_ ,” he hisses when he walks past him to get his sword again. “You said I could take it easy.”

“ _Again._ ”

So again, Taeyong hefts the sword and is promptly disarmed, but instead of letting him go to retrieve it again, there’s a strong hand on his shoulder, a leg wrapped around his to trap it, and a thick, cold black iron blade against his throat constricting Taeyong in place.

“Useless,” hisses Ten in his ear. “An unclaimed demigod who cannot fight is almost no demigod at all. Dead weight,” he says louder, moving his sword away and shoving Taeyong on the small of his back  so he stumbles forward, “is of no more use to this camp than mortals. If any of the rest of you would like to learn anything from our new recruit here, let it be this.”

“Serve your purpose. Taeyong. _Again._ ”

He picks up the sword, but he knows the most of all nothing has changed. Is Ten going to spar him until he wins? Because it’s a long shot, but he readies himself for the attack anyway. Ten slashes, going for his left side, and Taeyong is finally able to sidestep the blow when he’s tripping over something on the ground, and hitting the earth, hard. The wind leaves his lungs, and he can taste the sharp tang of ozone in the back of his throat. He looks at his feet to find a sharp outcropping of marble, rough around the edges and certainly not there before. As he watches, Ten moves a hand, and it sinks back into the ground.

“Come on, Taeyong. Learn. Adapt. Surely you’ve learned something by running away for three years. Show me even a sliver of potential.”

“What the _fuck?_ You’re using powers?”

Ten is ice cold. “I told you to. Adapt, or be killed the first time you set foot on a battlefield. Stand up. _Again._ ”

It’s when he stands that Taeyong first feels it. The faintest pull of static electricity building up on his skin. _No._

“Ten,” he says, urgency clear in his voice, “I can’t - I need to go cool off, or, _something_ , I can’t, not here-”

Ten sighs. "Damn it, Taeyong. Push, meet shove."

He drops his fighting stance, and lets his sword fall to his side. He looks almost bored when he raises his left hand, makes a swiping motion, and steals the light from the sparring pit into his left hand almost casually.

 _No. No._ It is the cold pavement of a gas station parking lot under him. It is ropes against his arms, rough and strong, it is the smell of gasoline burning his nose. It is the same darkness that stole his life the first time, and it is panic rising in his throat and electricity that he cannot keep from rising to his skin, and it is the telltale crackling in his ears. _No._

Lightning strikes _._

 _No._ He’s gone off in camp, against Ten, he must have killed him, there’s no way-

The dust settles, and Taeyong can make out Ten’s figure standing in front of him in a fighting stance, one arm raised above his head. He’s breathing heavily, and there’s a cut bleeding underneath his left eye. Soot stains one side of his face. He’s summoned an outcropping of rock, Earthbender-style, over his head, now blackened by the strike of his lightning.

It’s the eye of the hurricane. He waits for the retaliation. He waits for Ten to yell at him, to kick him out for almost killing him and dozens of other campers. He waits to be asked to leave camp, to be sent back on the road like the shill he knows he is here.

Instead, Ten drops to a knee, and so do the campers around him. Taeyong wheels around wildly, looking for a clue as to what had just happened. He finds only one clue: a glowing sliver of light above his head, floating gently in the air. A lightning bolt.

“Hail, Lee Taeyong,” Ten says, tone almost a little too peppy for the ball of impending doom weighing itself down in Taeyong’s stomach, “son of the Lord of the Skies.”

No. _No._ He surges forward, a hand grasping for the collar of Ten’s shirt.

“What the _fuck_ is your game, Ten?” he chokes out. “What the hell was that?"

Ten lurches away. “Sorry! Sorry,” he stammers quickly. “I had to. I had to get you claimed, and I figured it would take something a bit more explosive to make it happen. Bastard sure took his sweet time in getting you here,” he says, glaring at the sky, “but I’m just making up for three years of lost time.”

He shoots a simpering, guilty smile to Taeyong, but he’s lost all will to throttle Ten. _Son of the Lord of the Skies._ His father. _The most powerful demigods._

 

**Ten**

It’s late, but Ten and Yuta are heads of their respective cabins, meaning that after a careful nod at dinner, they and the heads of a few of the cabins slip out and meet on the ground floor of the Big House. It takes him some patience to wait for everyone to convene inside before he finally bitch-slaps the elephant in the room.

“Explain. Yuta.”

“You know this isn’t my fault.”

“I never said it was,” Ten stresses, “but something went wrong. Somewhere, somehow. How the _fuck_ did this happen.” His voice almost breaks.

He had managed to keep it together in front of Taeyong. He had known the moment he saw the lightning that Taeyong had been a rogue demigod for far too long. When he told Ten how long he had been running for his life, Ten’s blood had run cold. Taeyong’s case was the epitome of what Camp Half Blood aimed to prevent, and Ten’s failure was sitting across the table from him. He kept his shock under the surface, even though he almost lost it while he was out cold in the infirmary for a few days. But now was the time for answers, and Ten could finally let the rage pent up inside him break, even just a little, through.

“He’s _seventeen,_ Yuta. How is he just arriving at camp now? He’s been on the lam for three _fucking_ years, almost dying four times, never learning who he was, thinking he was a freak of nature. You should have seen how relieved he looked when he found out that I knew what he was, and a place where he could be safe. He doesn’t even know who his immortal parent is,” and on this last sentence, Ten’s voice breaks.

“And it’s me, isn’t it?” he says quietly. “He mentioned it - one day in Flushing, when he saw a monster explode into a cloud of dust, and his mom disappeared, and monsters started following him. Three years ago, it was me, wasn’t it, the monster he saw was that _fucking_ gorgon, a-and, it was me she were after, but it was him that you were looking for, because no monsters want anything to do with a son of Hades, no one does. So all the monster attacks you were tracking - they were out for him. The one time - _one time_ \- something attacked me, you were there.”

“And he is _,_ isn’t he,” Ten whispers. “He’s a son of Zeus. I’ve seen it myself. He could be the most powerful demigod alive now, if he had trained and learned to use his powers at camp.”

“Yuta. That day. There was, wasn’t there? There _was_ another demigod in Flushing. And he never came to camp, and he had to run for his life for three fucking years. It’s him, and _I_ took this from him. There’s no way that you were looking for a kid smelling like death, of _course_ you would have wanted a son of Zeus. I’m the reason he never came to Camp Half Blood, and everything I found here at camp - a family, a home, myself - they’re all his. They should _all be his. And it’s my fault they’re not._ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> notes  
> 1\. i realized in this chapter that i majorly fucked up the timeline. the first three chapters have been edited to adjust for this, nothing major, just changing the number of years ty has been on the lam but sorry for any confusion!  
> 2\. taeten is age adjusted so that they’re the same age!  
> 3\. im trying to do a role reversal kind of thing - like ten is the opposite of his godly heritage by nature (super bubbly, kind) and tae is the opposite as well? please please please let me know if its clear because it's gonna be rlly important later!!  
> 4\. really tried to ramp up the bants in this chapter please let me know what you think!!


	5. eighteen

**Ten**

“Move over.”

“I was here first.”

“But I asked you to move.”

“You didn’t ask nicely.”

“I would have thought we’ve been questing together long enough to be past ‘nice’.”

“Manners are timeless.”

“Yeah, but this quest isn’t, so can you just move over so I can sit down and eat a meal in goddamn peace?”

“Asshole.”

“Who’s on about manners, now?”

Taeyong moves over anyway. Ten plops down frustratedly on his hard-won space on the floor of the makeshift camp, slinging a leg over Taeyong’s knee just to annoy him. There’s plenty of room, of course (it’s a magic tent, and Kun does _not_ fuck around with his glamping), but it seems like today in particular Taeyong is feeling difficult. He shoves a spork into his metal lunchbox.

The two didn’t _not get along_ , per say, but it was definitely not a relationship that Ten would categorize under _kind_ or _supportive_ (those spots were reserved for Yuta and Taeil, respectively). To an outsider, Taeyong and Ten’s relationship could be comparable to two people who had a common friend, but didn’t really get along with each other. But there was something to be said about the concept of _understanding,_ and being the people they were meant that there were certain understandings that had to be had about Ten and Taeyong’s relationship, many of which had evolved between the two without either of them realizing.

The first understanding had been the most awkward to establish. It had happened just around the time that Taeyong was claimed. The camp was always kind of in a ruckus in the days after a claiming, especially the more grandiose ones. Of course, there wasn’t anything more grandiose than the claiming of a child of the Big Three, even if it hadn’t included a bolt of lightning almost taking off Ten’s head. The murmurs were loud, and they were incredulous: Ten had been the strongest demigod at Camp Half Blood for a long time. No one had come close to taking him down. Then, an unclaimed camper on his first day at camp had come pretty goddamn close. That wasn’t to mention Taeyong’s age, and apparent minor mental breakdown following the incident. It had been a rollercoaster of a day, but the understanding hadn’t been brewed in those days following.

It had been in the split second, the meeting of eyes, the proximity after the emblem had appeared above Taeyong’s head. The single breath in, out, after the lightning had struck. _._

Ten had lived as his father’s son for years before Taeyong had, but he had fallen into the role as naturally as clouds rolling into the sky. He knew, and Ten knew that he knew. They were victims of their birthright. They were orbiting planets, and for however short of a period Taeyong had spent at camp, even he could read the implications of their situation very, very well. In battle, they would learn to know each other as well as themselves, the others’ weaknesses becoming their own strengths and the others’ instincts becoming their own. But they were demigods first, and their fathers’ sons. They would be a team, but they could never be friends.

Distance. Rivalry. Competition. _A degree of separation, insurmountable no matter proximity, cast between the two the moment they were born as sons of gods. The earth is unforgiving, but the sky is inescapable._

The second understanding liked to present itself in the most inconvenient of times, times at which Ten would have liked nothing more than the ground to open up and swallow Taeyong (which he could actually do, if he really so desired, but Taeyong hadn’t quite touched that nerve yet), but a group of young, hard-headed Ares campers decides that _child of the war god_ means _don’t listen to any authority, ever_ , Taeyong and Ten are two sides of the same coin. No matter their personal quarrel, to their campers they were a united, well-oiled leadership machine. Even if he hates the war game strategy that Taeyong’s come up with, or if he thinks a different sparring drill would be more effective, Ten understands very well that the real power of his words comes from the support of Taeyong’s.

Leadership came first. Camp came first. Hell, survival came first. No matter the instance, if there were campers under their leadership, Taeyong and Ten were one team, undivided and inseparable. The understanding had led to several unfortunate instances, in one of which the two were called into the Big House for what they told the lesson they were pulled away from was “important quest business”. In reality, they were going to get yelled at by Chiron for pissing off Zeus, who had sent a thunderstorm over Camp Half Blood and therefore ruined a night of capture-the-flag, just because Ten wouldn’t leave the Taeyong’s cabin until he was finished yelling at him about a quest file he had forgotten to update.

(“Not my fault that Zeus cares so much that I was in the cabin. Even Taeyong doesn’t give that much of a shit, and he’s somehow even more anal retentive than his dad.”)

(“Don’t push your luck, Ten. Maybe I’ll start giving a shit just to piss you off.”)

Ten figures that’s why when the two are alone on questing trips, as they are now, the insurmountable leadership team that was basically already set to go down in demigod myth transformed into two of the pettiest, small-minded people, practically kids, bickering over crap like who got to sit where in the camp, who had to eat with the bent spork, who held the map. Even the smallest things mattered, suddenly, even who got the red pillow when they settled to camp for the night, and whose tree stump was better for sitting. Taeyong’s latest spiel had been loading up all of Ten’s clothes with huge amounts of static electricity, making him jump every time he touched anything for a whole day. In retaliation, Ten had made a tiny pebble jump into Taeyong’s shoe, replacing it with another one every time he stopped to shake it out. If only their juniors at camp could see them now.

(They had developed a system. Taeyong got the map on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Ten got it any other day, but to make up for the missing time he also got it whenever he decided Taeyong was being a bitch, usually by wrestling it out of his hands, or other equally violent action.)

The last understanding was perhaps the most important. They had each others backs. No exceptions, unconditionally. And as much as the first two understandings love to give him a hard time, Ten has to begrudgingly admit that it’s a pretty fucking good deal.

Taeyong ends up scooting over to let Ten sit down. He always does.

It’s Monday, and Taeyong studies the map over his meal. It’s scroll-style, but instead of weathered parchment in between the two ends, there’s a digital screen that blinks softly with loads of information. Using his free hand, he swipes through the Midwest and zooms in on their blue dot, placed a few miles just outside Buffalo.

“We’re on track to hit border control tomorrow morning,” he says around a mouthful of food. Taeyong groans.  “Leaving shouldn’t be an issue, but I don’t even want to think about the disaster that two Asian teenagers are gonna face trying to get back into the country they were _born in_ toting someone who didn’t leave it with them. How on earth would you convince someone that’s it’s not human trafficking? _No, no,_ ” he mimics, “ _we’re taking him to a camp, where a bunch of other kids raised by single parents live and learn how to fight monsters using swords and shit. What kind of camp, you asked? I can’t really tell you, but not labor, I promise._ ”

Ten scoffs. “Not my fault shadow travel fucks you up. I could have been done days ago with somebody else.”

“Yeah, well, you’re not with somebody else, you’re stuck with me. You should be the one apologizing for not being able to fly.”

They were empty words. Neither of them wanted to be anywhere else, and admittedly, neither of them wanted to be paired with anyone else either. Perhaps another understanding between the two laid in this essential fact, and although neither of them would dare to acknowledge it, they wanted to work together. They made a good team, besides the unfortunate issue of travelling, and could communicate well and efficiently. The childishness all but disappeared in the face of real, actual danger, meaning that at some points their jabs were nothing but half-hearted bants to lighten the mood. It was a relationship teetering precariously on the edge of falling apart, held stable only by their careful consciousness to keep their emotional distance and their almost inhuman cohesion. Because for however much Ten hated it for it to be true, Taeyong could read him like a book.

Even now, Taeyong pulls a bottle of water out of the mini-fridge, which is just out of Ten’s reach, and tosses it to him without even looking up. Ten can’t decide if he’s only noticed because he was thinking about it, or if they really are just that in sync.

 

**Taeyong**

The problem, as it turns out, isn’t border control. It’s what comes after border control.

“Welcome to Canada, eh?” says Ten in what is apparently supposed to be a Canadian accent. “‘Ome of the Toronto Blue Jays, and, uh, hockey and shit.”

Taeyong gives him a withering look. “We’re not in Toronto. We’re in Niagara. Plus,” he adds, looking down at the map, “we’re not close at all to where we’re going. We need to be in Vancouver. We’re catching a chariot that leaves in two hours, and it’s a favor from Hermes, so we can’t miss it, otherwise you’re driving forty hours across the country, because I refuse.”

“You mean you can’t.”

“Not my fault I was too busy being a nomad for three years instead of getting my driver’s license, dipshit.”

He tries to make it come off as light, but the moment the jab leaves his mouth he regrets it. Bringing up his past is almost a surefire way to make Ten quiet and moody for a while, which he sometimes appreciates, but today it just makes the air between the two awkward and poorly-timed. Thankfully, Ten seems to let it roll off his back easier than usual.

The map he’s looking at is suddenly snatched out of his hands, like a magician’s tablecloth trick. Empty-handed, he looks up to see Ten looking at it, panning through the screen to exactly the path he was about to show him.

“It’s Tuesday, Tae,” he says in a sing-song tone.

Taeyong rolls his eyes. “We have two hours. Let’s get something to eat.”

 

**Ten**

The chariot makes him nervous.

Certain concessions had to be made in order to have their dream duo function at its highest capacity, meaning that one of them had to make sacrifices to get places faster. Ten would have rather shadow travelled, but even a few meters of shadow travel in their trial runs in camp had sent Taeyong into fits of coughing and waves of nausea. Longer distances threatened a similar reaction to their first arrival at camp. Even Ten couldn’t argue that an unconscious Taeyong was better than a motion-sick and anxious Ten.

Of course, Ten could have shadow traveled and waited for Taeyong to arrive by chariot. But there was another understanding here, and maybe it was a subsequent implication to the third one: they had each others backs, and that meant they stuck together. He shivers a little and pushes his hands deeper into the pocket of his hoodie. They’re going too fast for anything on the ground to be even mildly visible, so he slides his back down the wall of the carriage to sit on the floor, knees to his chest, and stare at the scuffed wood. Taeyong, on the other hand, is standing at the helm and chatting amiably with the driver, obviously at ease among the clouds. It’s just overcast enough that the light isn’t harsh this high up in the air, which Ten is thankful for, but the gentle glow of the sun casts itself lightly on the curves and crests of Taeyong’s face, making him look soft and natural.

Ten likes Taeyong best like this, even though he hates himself up here. He likes seeing him comfortable, in his element, being everything he deserved to be years before. A leader. A diplomat. A confident, empowered demigod. Ten watches his lips move, probably saying something witty and helpful to Andreas that’ll give them good standing with Hermes in the future, although Taeyong’s low timbre is too similar to the rumbling of the wind for Ten to catch his words. He can only just make out the louder, sharp crests of his _s’s_ and _th’s_.Taeyong’s hair whips around his face in the breeze, and despite his best efforts, Ten drifts into an uncomfortable sleep while staring at Taeyong from an angle where he can’t tell and listening to the highlights of his voice.

He comes to in a dream.

It’s a small basement room, made of all white plaster walls and gross fluorescent lighting. Books and binders line the walls, evidence of the presence of students at some point, but for now he’s the only one here. He’s only been here once, during an old quest a few years ago, when a new camper had had the unfortunate luck of running into a nest of harpies in the form of Kumon teachers. It had been one of his more interesting quests, and had ended with Taeil having to reteach Jeno, a timid yet bright son of Helios, how to do long division, because the harpies had taught him some backwards method that only ended in frustration and a lot of remainders.

What interesting luck that he would be having this conversation in a literal den of harpies. He sighs, and swivels around in his tiny desk-and-chair contraption, obviously meant for children (but still fitting him infuriatingly well).

“Hi, Dad.”

There’s a Kumon teacher sitting at a desk, pudgy and a little sweaty but attentive. He looks up from a stack of papers, smattered in red ink and corrections from the pen in his hand, then immediately looks back down.

“Hello, Ten.”

“I’m a little busy right now. Couldn’t have visited yesterday?”

The teacher in front of him narrows his eyes. “Don’t think I’m not busy, too. I have to grade all these tests for people applying for the open position at the judgment table in the Underworld. Here, listen to this. _Question eight. In accordance with Act 17 of the Nuisances, Nitpickings and Nonsense clause of the 764 B.C. Protections for Souls of High Equitable Solicitations, what is the most severe of the infliction a soul can commit, and how are they to be punished?_ Someone named Jeffrey just wrote ‘ _eating someone else’s bread and looking down on them, punishment is telling their mom_.’ Seriously, who are they even letting take this test?”

“Why now, Dad?”

“Fine.” He looks up and lets the sheaf of papers in his hand rest on the table. “I chose now because we’re in Zeus’s kingdom. This means he can hear this, and I’m afraid it’s something that he should know just as well as you should.”

“Should have known. No such thing as privacy these days. Shouldn’t you not even be telling me about this Jeffrey guys’ standardized testing answers? You know, that’s the reason there are huge answer leak problems.”

The Kumon teacher drops his red pen on the desk and very slowly rubs his face, obviously frustrated. “You’re deflecting. So you do know what I’m here to say.”

Ten stills a little, and although he’s prepared his mind and heart for his conversation a million times, his heart rate picks up, ever so slightly. “Yes.”

“Good. So I don’t have to say it.”

Ten almost laughs. If he closes his eyes, he can still hear Hades’ voice, but he can ignore the cool air of the basement and the flickering of the camp light. And if he tries a little harder, he can almost imagine that he’s a normal kid, living in a normal house in suburban America, where his mother and father are mortals, and his sister adores him, and he has a pretty, perfect golden retriever who is his best friend, and his father goes _son, I think we have to talk about something,_ and he would go _not now Dad, I have homework to do,_ and his dad would go _ok, son, another time then._  If his godly father and any mortal dad were to have anything in common, and he means _anything_ , he would think it was their inexplicable inability to bring up even the mildest of touchy topics.

Of course, this isn’t a _mildly touchy topic._ This is a _very, very touchy topic,_ and Ten cringes to even think that his father has been watching him, and knows just about everything.

His dad knows. Ten knows, too.  

If his dad knows, his secret is perhaps a little more hidden that he thinks it is. Hades deals in shadows, after all, and secrets like his are made of shadows, and had to be kept tucked away in dark, secret places. They don’t work that well in light.

Sometimes, when it’s late at night and he can’t sleep, he takes the light from his cabin and slips it into his bag so he can stare into blackness. It’s not like there was much to begin with, but sometimes even the steady stream of moonlight coming in the high window is too bright, and he can see it imprinted on the backs of his eyelids when he closes his eyes. Sometimes, though, being in darkness doesn’t help much, either.

It hasn’t stopped him from trying, though. He wonders if it means that the darkness could be even darker, if he tried a little harder, or focused a little more. Of course, it’s impossible, and the things he sees when his eyes are closed are just figments of his imagination, but that doesn’t stop him from being mildly bothered by them. He spends the rest of those nights in a fitful, uncomfortable sleep that can’t really be fixed by anything, but isn’t really caused by anything, either. It’s an unfortunate moot point.

There are a lot of things like that in Ten’s life. He considers the horrible, touchy topic his father is trying to breach to him right now in the same way. However much as it belongs in the shadows, it shines a little too brightly for him to ignore.

He grits his teeth. “You don’t have to say it.” _I know._

“Be very careful, Ten,” he says. “There is no room in battle for extraneous matter.”

“This isn’t battle, this is _questing._ This is everyday activity for Camp Half Blood.”

“You think a lot of yourself, to imagine you can understand what millennia of tension between the earth and sky means. It doesn’t matter what your _lives_ consist of, Ten. Anything between you and any son of Zeus is not of pacificity.”

With that, Hades picks up his red pen and scratches a fat _0/10_ on the upper right corner of the sheet he’s grading, and fades into darkness.

 

“Wake up, we’re almost in Vancouver.”

“Fuck off,” he mumbles.

“ _Excuse_ me? What’s your damage?”

“Yeah, well, you’ll _excuse me_ if I’m not in the best of moods right now, having spent almost two hours now in this _fucking_ chariot that makes me want to die.”

“About an hour of which you’ve been _asleep_ for, which you don’t get to pretend like I haven’t noticed. Just get ready to land, asshole.”

“ _Fuck_ this,” he says, voice shaking. “If I can suffer through chariot rides every time we quest together, how come you can’t learn to put up with shadow travel? Because if you think this was easy for me to begin with, you’d be wrong.”

“Why are you bringing this up now? Not like this is a new development. And I get it, ok, I’m not as powerful as you, _ha ha._ You can’t possibly think that I _like_ to see you suffer through this.”

“Maybe I’m getting sick of it. Huh? Ever considered that?”

Taeyong wheels around. “Why are you so angry, dude? Got a nice nap in, and can’t just grit your teeth for, like, ten more minutes? Get fucked.”

“I have the _right_ to be angry sometimes, Taeyong,” and now he’s standing up in the chariot, even though it makes him a little nauseous. “You really don’t understand me, if you think that it’s easy for me to be up here.”

“Being uncomfortable does not mean you get to be a little whining pissbaby! We’re better than this, Ten.”

“Oh yeah, just like we’re _better than_ refusing to move over so I can have the basic, human joy of _sitting down?_ You don’t get to be high and mighty just because we’re up here.”

It’s a passenger chariot, meaning the back isn’t very large. It fits the two demigods comfortably, assuming the best of circumstances, which they unfortunately are not in, because two demigods in a petty spat take up a whole lot more room than two demigods sitting quietly. Their voices clamber over one another, and Taeyong is in his face, on some rant about how Ten’s dumb pebble prank is just as bad as not letting him sit down, and Ten matching his volume with some pointed jabs about Taeyong’s intolerance of even a little mess.

Andreas clears his throat awkwardly. There’s an odd moment of silence. When the pair look up, still jostling, Andreas points off the east side of the chariot’s carriage, where a small speck falling in the distance is unmistakably Ten’s backpack.

Ten and Taeyong make eye contact. He wills his face to portray as much of the feeling of ‘this is your fault’ as possible, but when he meets Taeyong’s murderous eyes, they’re saying the same thing. He swears, and pushes Taeyong away from him hard.

“Great. _Perfect._ You know what, Andreas? Why don’t you land, and we’ll meet you in a few. We have to deal with something.” And with that, Taeyong walks to the open back of the chariot, gives Ten a pointed glare, and marches off into free fall.

“Drama queen,” Ten mutters. He rolls his eyes, gives a simpering apologetic smile to Andreas, and melts into a puddle of darkness.

 

**Taeyong**

They meet on the ground. It’s a wooded area, populated only by trees and the sounds of evening birdsong in the distance. For however peaceful it is, Taeyong’s mood doesn’t match.

“Go left,” he says. “Make a circle, it can’t be far. Meet in the middle.”

“I’m going to do that,” Ten grumbles, “but not because you said it, only ‘cause it’s a good idea.”

 

**Ten**

He makes an angry circle in the direction Taeyong points him in. By angry circle, he means death circle. When Ten gets too riled up or agitated, he has the tendency to leave a little trail of destruction in his path. In this grassy area, it means a thin, winding line of dead grass, almost as confused as his thoughts.

 

**Taeyong**

He’s focusing too hard on the ground, watching his step to not trip over stalks of long grass that reach his waist, so that when he looks up to reorient himself, he’s in a small clearing in the woods. It’s golden hour, and the light pouring through the trees is yellowy and romantic.

“Beautiful, right?”

He wheels around, hand hovering instinctively over the collapsible spear slung in a pouch at his waist. Instead of a foe, he finds instead a girl, no more than a few years older than himself, standing serenely in the long, dry grass. Her hair waterfalls over her shoulders, glimmering slightly in the low sunshine. It’s the strangest, most brilliant orange color that Taeyong can’t quite place, until he looks up to see that it matches the golden light of the setting sun, filtering in through gaps in the trees, and several structures of hard, clear, orange stone. Inside them, he can make out a variety of plants.

Her voice is so soothing, high tones rising and falling in a rhythm that seems to match the rise and fall of his own chest. It’s so pleasant, and his readied hand stills. She wasn’t a threat, no one so sweet could be. _“_ Amber,” she says, gesturing gracefully at the delicate petals of a flower, frozen in place. “Preserves them eternally, so their beauty can be appreciated forever.”

He nods. Of course, she’s absolutely right. They’re beautiful - why shouldn’t they be frozen? They’re even more beautiful now they belong permanently to someone who can appreciate them.

“I am Hedylogos,” she says in her sweet voice, giving a little curtsy, and Taeyong grins dumbly. “Please, look around.”

He moves around the clearing, where he slowly begins to be able to make out several crags of the stuff, hidden in a pseudo camouflage in the golden light of the afternoon. There are more flowers, entire rows of them, and his eyes are trapped by their beauty. How incredible! As he moves on, the amber statues seem to get larger, and more elaborate: there’s a small shrub, a bonsai tree, even a mess of butterflies scattered in a frenzied cloud, active and motionless at the same time. The largest one of the group is a tree, which makes him do a double take. It’s rapturing at first glance, fat peaches hanging from its branches eternally, but a dark thought occurs to him, and he cranes his neck to look for the nymph of the tree, who would typically be found lounging in one of the low branches. Was she, too, frozen in amber, life stilled in her limbs-

 _“Oh, but Taeyong,_ ” Hedylogos croons, “ _you’ve been through so much. You’re so tired. You ran, ran, ran for so long. Can’t you take a rest? Can’t you sit here and take a rest with me, just for a while?”_ She giggles, and the sound feels like flower petals settling on his shoulders. She rushes towards him to place a gentle hand on his forearm and steer him away from the peach tree. 

Taeyong can remember, dully, the reason he had entered the clearing to begin with, but even now the knowledge is beginning to slip away, like trying to recall a dream too long after waking up. There was a reason he was here, sure, but didn’t it make so much more sense to talk to the nice lady?

When she pats the soft spot of tall grass next to her, it only makes sense to toddle over to her side and sit down clumsily. The grass is so soft, and she smells nice, and the breeze makes the entire clearing smell like flowers and sap.

Hedylogos’s hands run their way down his chest from behind him, and he melts into the warmth of her touch. The movement of her hands seems to leave wispy, golden trails in their path, almost as if she’s coming apart into stardust around him. That’s why it’s natural, so natural, when she runs one hand up his chest, grazing the soft dip of skin on his neck, and proffers an apple to him, playfully.

“A golden apple, son of Zeus,” she breathes in the shell of his ear, breath tickling the baby hairs on his nape. “A magical malady for the sick, but a shot of pure power for the well. Immortality, Taeyong. You’ll live forever, so we can rest here for as long as we’d like. Wouldn’t you want that, Taeyong? The power of life, for you and me, and we can take our time forever.”

Wouldn’t he like that? He had fought for his life more than enough to justify getting a little more of it than most. And he is, he is tired, he’s tired from jumping out of a chariot, and dealing with his dumbass questing partner, and being a leader all the time and never getting to just follow for once. He’s tired. Wouldn’t that be nice, to rest here?

He leans forward, and she guides him, and he takes a careful bite. It’s sweet, and the flesh hits his tongue and it feels like molten gold spreading through his veins. And that’s the problem, because whatever the fuck Taeyong has just bitten into is not a golden apple. It’s sweet, but suddenly, the strangest sensation begins in his throat, and the sweetness is suddenly overpowering and a little disgusting. He starts to cough, eyes watering, but he can’t quite eject the feeling from his throat. A cough morphs into a gag, and there’s suddenly something solid sitting in the back of his throat, weighing heavily on his breath. It’s forcing its way out of his mouth now, and it can see it spreading out from his lips: warm, solid amber, encroaching and sealing his mouth shut and dribbling down his neck so he’s unable to speak.

“Tempting, right, my Taeyong?” she whispers into the shell of his ear, and it seems like only now he can hear the vile hiss lying in the undertones of her voice, “And so are you, so what could I do but fall for my temptations to you as you have yours?”

He’s stiff now, engaged solely in trying to breathe, and with him safely disabled on the grass Hedylogos begins to giggle, echoey and rackening, and she stands up to move away from him. 

“Oh, but you’ve brought me more?” she says, peering off into the distance out of the clearing. “What a delight. It seems I’ve fallen for him, too.”

He hopes it doesn’t mean what he thinks it means. It does.

“Taeyong?” Ten’s voice is cautious and tinted with worry as it echoes through the clearing, but he calls out clearly. “Taeyong? I’m still fucking pissed at you, but the chariot guy says this happens more than you’d think, and he doesn’t get paid until he delivers us and we sign for it. His wife is making stuffed grape leaves for dinner, and I think he wants to get moving.”

He can hear her voice, dripping with fake sweetness that he can hear now only because it’s not directed at him. Hedylogos takes her time with Ten, but eventually, he can begin to hear the sappiness drip off her voice as she coerces him. “ _Ten, baby,”_ he overhears, _“you’ve been so strong for so long. The mask you wear, you can leave it with me, take it off for a while. Take down the wall, Ten, and we can rest together, you and me.”_

Taeyong likes to think that Ten is smart enough to fall for it, but he also likes to think that he’s smarter than Ten, and Hedylogos got him pretty damn good. Her voice is sickly sweet and she keeps crooning at Ten, almost like baby-talk, and it makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. There’s a rustling, and a soft sigh from Ten. There’s a worryingly weighted silence, and Taeyong can imagine the uncertainty on his face.

“The golden apple, Ten. Accept it, and we can rest here. You’ll have all the time in the world, we can look for him later. Rest with me. Accept your immortality.”

All the same, though, he can see it happening in his head. It plays like a old-timey movie. She cups a hand over his cheek, he leans into it, she offers his the apple, he takes it, they’re fucked up a creek. His heart rises in his throat. There was no way Ten would be able to resist it. If she could get Taeyong then she could get anyone, it hadn’t even been a question of his own intelligence, it had been a problem of instinct, and in that moment, his instincts had told him wrong. Yes, this is right. He can see it now: Camp Half Blood loses its two most powerful and senior demigods, Camp Half Blood’s quest system gets shut down, demigod activity skyrockets across the country, monster backlashes increase, the gods are overrun-

“Oh, no thanks.”

Excuse me?

Had Ten, the same Ten that Taeyong has seen eat a paper plate once _just to see if it’s as good as the satyrs say it is, I swear they have to be lying to us about something_ , just refused the singular most tempting item in all of mythology? A golden apple? The promise of eternal life?  

It seems like Hedylogos has the same train of thought. She says nothing for a moment, and then in a significantly less sweet and charming voice, “...sorry?”

“Yeah, no thanks. I’ll pass.”

“You’ll live forever, you know that? Never retiring to the Underworld, never aging, never having to leave my side. Don’t you want that?”

“The Underworld’s pretty nice, I’ll have you know, if you know where to go, but that’s not really important. And living forever sounds dope. I just don’t like apples. Actually, the smell is bothering me a little bit, do you mind moving it farther from my face?”

“Most people would go for this, you know.” Hedylogos has lost some of her dreamy quality, and Taeyong can hear frustration lifting the edges of her tone. “Powerful, handsome men have fought over the chance just to even meet me, and I offer you the rest of your life, and you refuse what some have killed for?”

“And I get that,” says Ten, backing away, “and I respect their choice and your choices, too. It’s nothing personal, tree lady, I just don’t like apples, and I need to find something, Andreas is gonna be pissed.”

There’s a beat of silence, like Hedylogos is confused, then she speaks again.

“I know what you hide, Ten. Do you really think that you can continue to live your purpose as who you are? Are you so convinced you are strong enough to maintain the mirage when your father has condemned you? There is no life for demigods like you.”  

If Taeyong could have moved his eyes, they would have widened. Partially out of surprise at Hedylogos’s statement, but partially because the moment she finishes speaking, Ten’s extinguished the light from the clearing. He’s forgotten how shocking it is when Ten does it without warning him, but it’s not enough to send him into a panic like it has before. Now, it steals his breath for a second, but he quickly calms, reminding himself _it’s the Ten you know, you trust him._

“I don’t want your _fucking_ apple,” Ten spits, no longer the cautious, almost friendly character he had been seconds before, “and I am looking for something, and if you can’t help me, then you’re useless.”

There’s a rumbling, and Taeyong can hear the low scraping of earth and bones in the grass around him. Ten’s summoned skeleton warriors, which Taeyong knows he never does if he can help it, because they make him feel gross for exploiting the dead. What had Hedylogos said to make him so angry?

“And I’m not sure what you think you _know_ ,” Ten says suddenly, tone uncharacteristically sour, “but you’re wrong _._ ”

Then, through the darkness that Taeyong has become so familiar with, Ten attacks.

 

**Taeyong**

It takes Taeyong a while to talk again. Even Andreas has picked up on the frigid atmosphere on the chariot, and for a long, long time they listen to nothing but the sound of the wind whistling past their ears. Even Taeyong, whose favorite pastime is staring at the clouds going by, has sunk into a curled-up seated position, back to the hard wooden wall, tucked tightly against Ten’s side.

They’re too shaken to even be pissed at one another. Taeyong can’t quite shake the feeling of amber running down his throat, so he burrows into the warmth of Ten’s shoulder to suffer in silence. It’s moments like this that Taeyong can recognize the merits of their relationship: when it mattered, they were there for each other. And right now, Ten’s comforting silence is exactly what he needs.

“Poisoned apple?” Ten asks finally.

“Yeah.”

“Spirit of temptation got you?”

“Yeeeah.”

A beat of silence.

“Jesus fucking Christ, who _are_ you?” There’s no bite to his words.

Ten laughs a little, and Taeyong can feel the vibrations through his shoulder. “Fruits are scary, and I never eat them. Personal principle. I guess we just got lucky. Now, if it had been a golden pastry, we might be in a speck of trouble. I’d kill a man for a tiramisu.”  

They’re silent for a moment, and Taeyong takes the time to wonder to himself, truly, seriously, how he had ended up with a human enigma for a partner.

“How were you able to resist Hedylogos so easily?” he asks quietly, instead. “She almost _killed_ me, and I still think she’s pretty. And don’t tell me it’s just because you don’t like apples, Ten, there’s no way it’s that stupid.”

Ten steels slightly, causing Taeyong to lift his head to study his face. It’s in a sort of fragile relaxed expression and his eyes are stormy. “No,” he says shortly, not meeting Taeyong’s gaze, “I really just don’t like apples.”

Another long, long pause. Ten relaxes a bit. Taeyong returns to staring into space. Then.

“Are you gonna talk about it?” His voice is still small.

“Talk about what.” It’s not a question, but he can hear the stiffness in Ten's voice.

“Ten, she said you were hiding something. It made you angry - _really_ , scary angry.”

“It was nothing. She was reading too much into nothing.”

Taeyong lifts his head from Ten’s shoulder, and swivels around to face him, even though he keeps his eyes trained ot the ground. Ten, too, makes no motion to meet him. Taeyong talks to the ground. “I a-almost fucking _died_ back there. How am I supposed to move forward knowing that I can’t even trust myself? Knowing that whatever I was in the past will always win over what I am now? I can’t trust myself, not now, probably not for a long time.”

He takes a deep breath.

“The least I can do is be able to trust you. _Please._ Talk to me. What did she mean, Ten?”

“Fine.” Ten’s harsh tone is the exact opposite of what Taeyong was hoping to hear, and it makes his blood run cold. “Fine. She wasn’t talking about nothing. I got some shit, alright? I’m kind of fucked up _here,_ ” he spits, gesturing wildly at his head. “That’s what you want to hear, right?”

“ _No_ ,” Taeyong says, unable to keep the shake out of his voice. “I don’t _need_ to hear anything - I just thought, maybe, if you wanted to not be so emotionally stunted, Ten, and unable to show any semblance of affection, you could talk about it. That’s _all._ ”

Ten waits a long, long time before he talks again, as if he’s planning out something very, very carefully. When he does, it’s curt.

“Don’t be fucking _ignorant,_ Yong.”

Taeyong’s world begins to spin a little.

“I know you know. We’re going to be enemies one day, and I know, _so do you_ , that all the shit I tell you right now is going to boomerang itself back into my face when our fathers go to war. _I know you know._  I’d love to be an idealist, and think that your offer is from purely a place of caring, but as my father likes to constantly remind me, we don’t live in an ideal world. So save yourself the stress, too. I won’t talk about it. You don’t get any of my shit, and I won’t ask for any of yours. For the sake of our futures, _please,_  let’s just pretend you never asked.”

They’re so funny, moments like these. In the reeling silence afterwards, he can’t hear anything but the blood rushing in his ears, meaning quiet realization escapes him until much later, usually when he’s alone, and can let himself stare at the sun until his eyes start to tear up and he can just _think_.

_Oh._

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. what do u do when u cant find mythology that fits exactly into ur story??? u make it up!!! aka i genderbent hedylogos and made up the amber thing, i can’t be fucked to do real academic research  
> 2\. the second understanding of ‘leadership comes first’ was definitely NOT inspired by the markhyuck summer fight of 2017 and should NOT be compared to that  
> 3\. im sorry but ten’s fear of fruits is SUCH A MEME and i had to incorporate it into this fic somehow i know its stupid but i hope it was funny at least  
> 4\. i saw a kumon in my new town and i think it triggered some deep down rage in me i didn’t know i had so i had to write about it  
> 5\. this is my favorite chapter so far i think, hope you all enjoyed!! just a heads up but this is probably going to be the last regular update for a while, im going back to school this month and need to focus yeehaw but you can check for updates and ask me any questions at my tumblr!!


	6. eighteen, part 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: suicide mention, feelings

**Ten**

Fortunately, and he means _very fortunately_ , they don’t have to spend too long in horrible, weighted silence searching for the demigod in Vancouver, because the demigod in Vancouver makes it agonizingly clear where he’s to be found.

Andreas seems concerned, to put it lightly. There are dark clouds littering the sky in the distance, and some unfriendly-looking flashes of light are getting dangerously more frequent. Ten almost looks to Taeyong to ask him to gauge the storm they’re headed towards, but catches it before he even lets himself turn around. Ten is standing at the helm of the chariot, knuckles threaded white as he grips the smooth wood in mild subconscious terror.

Ten’s really done it. He’s dug the grave and lowered himself into it, except the grave was already dug, and he hasn’t put himself in it, he’s pushed Taeyong in, knife to his back, and turned away without even waving goodbye. Ten is so, so _fucked._ And he doesn’t even have the decency to feel _bad_. He’s known that this moment was coming, and rehearsed it in his head so many times that it lies in the weird, dream-like state of wondering if he had actually said it out loud or not. If he knew what he was going to say when the moment came, he reasoned, it was going to be easier to say it out of muscle memory then to be lured in by Taeyong’s huge, brown eyes. He feels like he had just turned off and turned back on, rebooted like a shitty WiFi connection.

It was in this laid the crux of his problem. Anyone with any less self control than Ten would have been a goner years ago. Anyone with less self control would have let themselves fall further, further than Ten had every time he turned to look at Taeyong when he wasn’t looking back just to stare at him. Every time Taeyong would sigh, and Ten would pretend for a moment that Taeyong was just as smitten as Ten was. Every time Ten cracked a joke, then immediately glanced at Taeyong just to see if he would laugh, and getting unreasonably happy to catch a grin breaking his face. Every time they’re questing and it’s late, and Ten gets to see glimpses of Taeyong that only slip out when he’s sleepy and fuzzy and not as on guard as he usually is. Taeyong is made of light and Ten has been dark, dark for a long time, but he thinks he’d very much like to belong to the light. To think that he could be the thing that made the light (his light!) shine a little brighter.

But to say there were forces acting against them is lower than an understatement. His father’s thinly veiled warning. Who he is. Who Taeyong is. In another life, maybe. Not this one. The next one, perhaps.

So he had had to find a way to cop out. To jump ship. To break the unspoken bridge that grew every time they met eyes, brushed hands, exchanged smiles. And instead of being telling Taeyong the truth - his horrible, horrible truth - he had told him the truth of the Fates. The truth of his father. The truth of prophecy, destiny, all the bullshit. Not Ten’s own truth. It was fitting, really. He was never going to be brave enough to face it to begin with. All the falsehoods of righteousness, the posits of his own self-respect and moral upstanding - what a joke. He was never going to have been brave enough. Taeyong was stronger than him. It was why Ten knew that he was strong enough to stand it at all. Maybe he had put Taeyong in the grave. But Ten trusted him to dig his way out and to cling on in a way that he didn’t trust himself to.

“It’s that.”

Taeyong’s walked up behind Ten to join him at the helm of the chariot. They stand next to each other, but there’s a respectable distance between the two - more than he would have left normally, but maybe Ten’s just imagining it. The wind at the helm is stronger and straighter than their spots from earlier against the wall. From his angle, where Ten vehemently refuses to turn his head to face him, he can get glimpses of what Taeyong looks like in this moment: a flash of brown hair when Taeyong turns his head to survey both sides of the sprawling landscape in front of them, a hand raising to his face to shield the sunlight from his face, a moment of his cheekbone.

Taeyong is at his clearest here, at the helm of the skies, and yet still Ten can barely catch a sliver of him. He gives himself once glance. There is nothing behind his eyes, but their glassy surface reflects the flashes of lightning in the distance.

Taeyong looks pointedly at the storm. “That’s where we’re heading.”

 

**Taeyong**

He really, really doesn’t feel like adding _cold and wet_ to the list of things that suck right now, but he’s faced with the strangest, smallest dilemma that he can’t quite think his way through.

It’s raining, and Taeyong, under normal circumstances, can quite easily summon a solidified layer of compressed air around himself to keep himself dry and maintain full visibility. This rule, however, is dictated pretty strongly by common courtesy to be extended to the rest of his party, given they lack the skills to keep themselves dry on their own, which Ten tragically lacks. Taeyong _really_ doesn’t feel like being nice to Ten right now, but he doesn’t really think he can shield himself from the downpour without his conscience eating at him enough to shield Ten too.

And he is mad at Ten, he really is. He’s mad, and a little sad, and ready to be done with the quest so he can be far, far away from him for a while. But he doesn’t want Ten to know that, because now, apparently, their entire relationship is some sort of strange power struggle, where Ten can’t know how much Taeyong has been broken by his words, because that means something important now, somehow. It means a strong outer wall, a stoic appearance, the poise of bravery.

In all honesty, it’s a good reminder. Ten pushing him away - it’s healthy, he tries to tell himself. Taeyong had been slipping lately. Sometimes, when he’s tired, he can tell when he’s said a little too much, or curled up a little too close to Ten’s warm side, or trusted Ten to check the wards around camp when he’s just too tired. He’s gotten too comfortable with Ten, he’s let himself give up some of his constant alertness to him. And maybe sometimes it was more than just trust that he was giving to Ten - sometimes it was more than that. Sometimes it was only being able to fall asleep after Ten has, because the sound of his quiet breathing was the only white noise that could stop his mind from wandering. Sometimes it was the overwhelming urge to cup Ten’s face in his hands and be his strength when he was winded from an especially long shadow-travel. Sometimes it was the pleasing weight of Ten’s head on his shoulder. In any case, Taeyong’s started to trust him too much, and this was just a reminder that no one was as responsible for himself as he was. No more slipping.

But that didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt to get absolutely rejected. In all honesty, there’s nothing, _nothing_ , that he would like more in this instant than to see Ten get absolutely soaked.

They’ve left Andreas on the street a few blocks from the heart of the storm, deciding to make the rest of the way on foot. With a generous _drachma_ tip and a signature on a form titled _Confirmation of Delivery of Precious Goods,_ which Taeyong is a little honored to be referred to as and Andreas seems relieved to get, they slip out of the alleyway quietly, blending easily into the rushes of people on the streets trying to get out of the rain.

He knows where they’re heading - he’s known since he could even smell the ozone in the air from miles away. It had smelled familiar, like the sharper, harsher scent that his own electricity takes on when he’s about to lose control. It was unmistakably demigod. As they make their way towards the storm, the rain smattering on the back of their bowed heads gets harder and the people around them begin to thin out. There weren’t many people heading in the direction they were, towards the dark clouds in the distance.

 

**Ten**

The demigod is bowed on the wet concrete of the parking structure, on all fours with his head hung low. Another arc of electricity races through the air, but the boy only shudders and stiffens when it arcs through his body from the skies. The lightning doesn’t look particularly threatening - even in the midst of battle, he’s seen Taeyong give off stronger strikes. There’s no fight left in his body. Thunder follows quickly after, muffling everything else for the few seconds that it rumbles through his bones.

Surrounding the demigod, however, is what really makes Ten’s blood run cold. Manticores - multiple. They’re increasingly encroaching on the boy’s huddled figure, but each touchdown of lightning shakes them back a few meters.

The demigod’s plan isn’t going to last long. The manticores are dumb but they’re getting braver, skittling back less on each strike and diving back in quickly. The rain is loud and incessant, but when Ten pulls his Stygian iron blade out of its sheath at his waist, the sound of metal scraping snaps three sets of beady manticore eyes to meet his own. He can feel Taeyong’s presence at his side, bright and almost overwhelmingly present, and this is _it:_ the will to fight that never quite left the two, no matter how Taeyong was hurt by Ten’s words. Two sides of the same coin. Two halves of the same warrior.

 

**Taeyong**

“Who are you?” The boy is yelling over the storm. He’s standing now, feet apart and hands prepared at his sides, clearly ready to defend himself. His eyes are wild, and Ten can see the crazed fear threatening to break his facade of bravery. The manticores are long gone but their influence isn’t, and the boy is jumpy and skittish.

“I’m Ten,” he starts, slowly but firmly so that he can be heard. “This is Taeyong, we’re scouts from Camp Half Blood, we’re here to help you.”

“How do I know you’re not more of _them_?” He gestures wildly at where the manticore’s hunched figures had dissolved into yellow dust.

“Those were monsters, and they hunt us too. We’re like you, and we want to help you, but you need to let us. Can you tell us your name?”

“I’m Mark,” he starts, tone cautious and slow but not panicked as it had been earlier, “and I-I don’t really know what happened here.”

“That’s fine, Mark, perfect, really. That’s all we need for now. Can I come closer to you?”

Ten is almost expecting the walls around Mark to come down. Mark is obviously exhausted, and the fight in his eyes is quickly fading as he sways a little on his feet. Ten can practically hear him thinking, and it comes out in the tone of his voice: the panic comes back, lifting his speech, driving him crazy.

“Don’t come any closer.”

Ten thinks faintly of Taeyong. He stops.

“Can I talk to you from this distance, then?”

No reply. Ten takes it as a no, and keeps his eyes on Mark. It almost looks like he gets distracted, like he’s thinking to himself.  

“Four months,” Mark chokes out. “Four months ago - something happened, and I-I’ve almost died, like _twice_ , now, and those things keep chasing me, so I decided to come home to look for my mom, but-” Mark’s sentence dies in his throat, and he looks at Ten and Taeyong like he’s seeing them for the first time. The fear is back. “They found me again.”

“I _know,_ Mark, I understand, I hear-”

“No, you don’t! You really don’t! I-I’m a _freak_ , I keep hurting people, and I don’t want to anymore but it won’t stop, I keep hurting people but I’m just trying to keep _them_ away from me, you don’t _know-”_

The wind begins whipping again, and Ten can see Taeyong cringe as he feels the storm begins to work its way out of his control again.

“I’ve been on the run for four months now, and those _things_ almost killed me, and I-I just want to go home, but I knew they’d follow me back, but what was I supposed to do? Keep running until I eventually died?”  

“I ran for three years, Mark.”

It’s Taeyong now, but his voice has changed, just in the slightest, but it booms a little louder on the sharp tones of his _s_ ’s, and reverberates in the thick air for a split second longer than it maybe should. It carries over the rain and wind, reaching all Taeyong commands it to. A Zeus power. It snaps Ten to attention, and it obviously does the same on Mark - it’s as if the fight has left his body, and suddenly, Ten is acutely aware of who Mark really is in this moment - a terrified, wet kid who just wants to find his mom. 

“Those powers you have? I have them too. Maybe we are freaks - but you’re not the only one.”

“My mom disappeared when I was fourteen. I ran from a manticore for three years before I gave myself an ultimatum. I know what you’re going through, because it happened to me, except you’re probably smarter than me, because you confronted your situation a lot sooner than I had.” Taeyong lets out a strange giggle, half-nervous and half-scared, and it doesn’t match with the godly power he exudes in this moment.

“I went back home when I was seventeen to find some answers, and if I didn’t find any, I was going to kill myself.”

Taeyong looks pained, and even though Ten can’t tear his eyes from the raw hurt on his face, Taeyong is staring straight at Mark.

“I didn’t even know how I was going to, or if my powers, which I hadn’t even recognized as a gift back then, would even allow me to. But I would have found a way. I couldn’t live like that anymore - I wouldn’t even call it living. I was surviving. But barely. Then I was found - found by people like us. I found Ten, I found people who understand me, I found a home. I owe Ten my life, and I would die to protect him. All of it. They mean everything to me, and I mean _everything_. It took me three years of wondering when I was going to suck it up and off myself to find that.”

“That’s the point of people like _me,_ okay, Mark?” Taeyong says, desperation lifting the edges of his voice. “It’s so we can do better with people like you. People who deserve it - t-to be safe, to be taken care of, to have that home. I know what you’re going through, Mark, but it can be better - _we_ can be better.”

He’s choking on his words now, and Ten isn’t even looking at Mark anymore, he can’t draw his eyes away from Taeyong. The hurt in his voice doesn’t do justice to the absolute shattered look in his eyes. It’s the same look as the kid lying in a puddle of gasoline in the parking lot of a gas station in Flushing, New York. When Taeyong chances a glance at Ten, their eyes meet too quickly, and Taeyong’s soul is bare, and it speaks, loud and clear. _You were never supposed to know. I’m sorry._

 _He’s sorry._ Because there’s an elephant in the room now, one that they both have to deal with. Ten knew too much. And if what he had said - _fated enemies and all that -_ was true in any regard, Ten now had one too many bargaining chips. There was no mercy in the game of war they were playing now.

“I need you to calm down, and let us help you.”

Mark’s swaying like a leaf in the wind at this point, and Ten can practically see the urge to stay strong melt out of his expression. He collapses onto all fours on the wet concrete of the parking structure, as if telling his world and his fears: _take me. I surrender._

Taeyong lays a hand on Mark’s hunched back, and the wind racing past Ten’s ears immediately calms to a slight breeze. The rain’s begun to lessen, too, which is probably Taeyong’s doing, too, coupled with a slow but steady lightening of the sky, and Ten remembers to breathe.

 

**Taeyong**

Mark, if not a little crazy, is quick to calm. Taeyong wonders, vaguely, if he had been that unstable four months into his involuntary lam. Maybe it was like a growing pain - he was in-between denial and acceptance, and might have been just as volatile if he had been brave enough to face it like Mark had.

Their camp has adjusted for the new member of their crew, and a third little adjunction had popped up within the tent. It had a small shag rug and a cute little cot with a stuffed seagull toy on it, but Mark had adamantly refused to be alone. He had made a little nest of blankets and pillows for himself in the common area, and made at least one of the pair stay in the partition with him at all times.

He was curious, first and foremost. The billions of questions that Taeyong had been too jaded to ask upon his first arrival at camp poured out of Mark without abandon, most of which Taeyong was surprised to know he was able to answer. If he had been in any other mood, he would have been happy to answer them, but looking at Ten makes something in his stomach turn right now.

Why the hell had he done that? All he had to do was talk Mark down, calm him down, back him away from his mental ledge. Instead, he had said too much - _way too much._ Ten knew now. He knew how much he meant to Taeyong, despite his best efforts to keep it under a cool exterior. It was the truth, but it was a truth that he could barely admit to himself, but now Ten knew. It was one thing to let his guard down a little too much around Ten, but it was another to let him know. Ten knew too much.

_Gods, Taeyong, you’ve really fucked up now._

He retreats into his partition to let Ten tend to Mark for a while, appreciating the magic cloth of his partition which mutes everything, including Ten’s voice and Mark’s fascinated exclamations.

Taeyong is tossing around vague plans to go find a nice cloudy spot in the sky that he can chill for a bit and watch the city go by beneath him. He’s packing a little backpack with a few snacks when his wall unzips to reveal Ten’s soft mop of hair, still wet and a little stringy from the rain.

It makes his heart ache, just a little.

“I was just about to-”

“Cool! Don’t.” Ten has no qualms about entering Taeyong’s space, and slips through the gap in the partition easily.

“If you’re trying to talk to be about what happened today, don’t, okay?” Taeyong protests weakly, hands still moving his things around. “We - we can just ignore it. That’s what’s best. Is Mark okay? Did he get enough to eat-”

“Don’t you think I’m very much aware of how _unfair_ things have been for you your entire life?”

Ten is unabashed, and if he was anyone else, Taeyong would be amazed at his lack of tact with his clearly sensitive underbelly right now.

“Look. I dug a grave, and I pushed you in it, because I thought you were stronger than me, and that you’d handle this shit better than I would have. I still think that - but if what I did was right, objectively speaking, it wasn’t _fair._ And shit has been _real fuckin’ unfair_ for you lately. So I know your shit now, and I know that you know that I know, okay, and I’m tired of ignoring the chimera in the room. Here,” he says, tossing down a black plastic bag that emits a _clink_ of glass bottles when it hits the ground, “have one of these, and just, I don’t know, be cool, okay?”

“What are you talking about - a _grave_? I have no idea what-”

Ten sits down heavily. None of his motions are hesitant; he’s obviously not scared of the distance that existed between them not a few hours before. It’s as if the crevasse Ten had opened between them isn’t even there, which Taeyong would be a little offended by, because it was _his_ feelings that had been hurt, if he wasn’t so shocked that Ten was talking to him so calmly at all.

“ _Gods_ , this is going to suck.” Ten opens the bag, revealing an Arizona iced tea, which he hands to Taeyong, still dumbfounded, and a tiny bottle of Fireball, which he cracks open and sucks down in a single motion, unbothered. “But I owe you this much. In the name of fairness.”

“Owe me _what?_ What are you doing, what about M-”

“I said we wouldn’t do this. This whole _emotional,_ fluffy feelings shit where we get to know each other, and, I dunno, _bear our heart of hearts_ or some bullshit. But circumstances arose, and you ended up having to tell me more than I probably should know. And since it doesn’t really seem like we can just take it off the table, there’s only one option. Let’s talk about _my_ shit.”

 

**thirteen**

Ten cannot think of a single way camp could be going better.

He’s been here for a little under a month now, and was making friends and learning new things every day. He was freshly claimed, and had just moved into his own cabin at camp. People were treating him differently, but he shrugged it off as just a knee-jerk reaction to being claimed. Of course they would see him differently now - he had just been claimed by one of the Big Three. He was kind of a big deal.

He’s getting better at sparring. After being claimed, Taeil had gone digging in one of the back rooms of the armory looking for something he called _Stygian iron,_ which was cold and black. It was different than all the other campers’, who had flashy bronze, but the sword sat in his hand much better than anything Celestial bronze ever had. At evening training, the rest of the campers got tired as the session went on, their reaction times slower and movements lazier. But as the sun set and darkness fell, Ten felt more energized than ever. His movements were sharper, and it even felt like his vision was clearer too.

Being claimed had been nothing but a celebration to him. He wasn’t sure why the other campers weren’t as happy for him as he thought they might have been, but he was doing so well he figured their opinions didn’t really even matter.

At dinner, he sits alone at the Hades table until someone at the Hermes table makes eye contact with him and gestures him over. Different tables had been inviting him to join them recently, usually ones where he had made friends who understood how much it sucked to be the only camper under his house. He trots over to the table, where a few kids shuffle to the side to make room for him.

Ten digs into his plate and is halfway through an especially ambitious bite of roast beef when there’s a tap on his shoulder from farther down the table. It’s an older camper, who doesn’t look particularly pleased to have been squished down the end of the already crowded bench.

“Kid, no more sitting with other tables, okay? Stick to Hades, we’re crowded enough.”

“But they invited me. And all my friends are in Hermes, I was here for almost a month.”

“Yeah, well, you’re claimed now, so it’s different now. You fuckin’ stink like death anyway.”

“ _Alex._ ” There’s a sharp voice from across the table, and Ten follows it. It’s Johnny, an older camper. “Shut up, dude. He can sit here.”

“No, he fuckin’ can’t, Johnny. Get off your high horse, he’s not a son and he knows it. We take care of enough unclaimed campers, if there’s one who’s been claimed he can sit where he belongs.”

“You’re such an asshole, you know that? We take everyone - it’s what we _do._ If you have a problem with that then you can take it up with Dad.”

“So we’re just supposed to take everyone, now? If everyone decided where they could sit then what’s the point of having tables anyway? We get all the fucking new kids, now we have to keep the Hades kid too?”

“I’ll go, uh, it’s fine.” Ten quickly gathers his plate. He doesn’t want to get Johnny in trouble for defending him, he had been nice enough already. “It’s fine, I can sit at the Hades table.”

“Ten. Sit down.” Johnny isn’t even looking at him, but it’s clear that it’s not a suggestion.

“Oh, it’s fine. I-I’m just going to go, if that’s okay.” He’s running down the smooth marble steps of the pavilion before he can get an answer. Ten isn’t really sure where he’s running, but something about the way that Alex had called him _Hades kid_ left a sour taste in his mouth.

It’s too early to head back to his cabin. He’s in the stables before he can even realize where he’s going. It’s quiet here, and it smells like hay and worn leather. The door creaks open, and there’s no one inside as he heads deeper into the rows of stalls. The pegasi are seemingly indifferent to his presence, and sniffle softly as he walks past.

He walks out the back of the stables and is in the grassy pasture when he spots it. There’s a pegasus lying on its side in the pale moonlight. His side is slick and shiny with something that Ten doesn’t recognize until he can see its labored breathing and panicked eyes. There are two long, wide gashes running down the flank of the animal, running down its ribs from the junction of its smooth side and feathery wing.

He gasps, and rushes towards the animal. As he gets closer, the pegasus starts thrashing more, whinnying a horrible, high screech, but it’s too injured to make any movement away from Ten. When he gets close enough to reach out an arm, the animal stiffens and keens, but stops moving to allow Ten to touch it. The moment his fingers brush its coarse hair, he can feel the life force of the pegasus. It’s pulsing, but it’s dull and wispy, almost out of reach.

“Where did he go?” Voices echo through the stable. He can hear footsteps moving through the stables behind him.

“There’s someone there! He hurt that pegasus!”

“It’s the Hades kid! Someone call Chiron!”

“The Hades kid killed a pegasus!”

Panic flares in Ten’s chest. “I didn’t! I didn’t, can someone please get help, it’s dying!”

More people are coming now, summoned by the ruckus and the frantic calls for help. There’s a sizeable group behind him now, and the murmurs are rising. He’s still by the side of the animal, but someone pushes him out of the way.

“I-I didn’t do this,” he stammers to no one in particular. “He was hurt when I got here, can someone please just get some help-”

“You’ve done enough damage,” someone snipes, and Ten can feel hot tears start to roll down his face. Why wouldn’t they believe him? Anyone who knew Ten knew he would never - _never_ \- even imagine hurting anyone or anything at camp.

Someone shoulders their way through the crowd and kneels down next to the injured animal. They curse, and bark instructions at few other campers to get supplies and call for more help. He wheels around to face Ten.

“Ten, did you do this?”

“No!” he chokes out.

It’s Yuta, and suddenly Ten is crying harder, so hard he can barely speak.

“How could you say that?”

Yuta, who had always been on his side, who knew him like a brother, looking at him like he was a murderer, a freak, a boy touched with death. And it’s here, he realizes, that he can finally see himself in the way that the eyes staring at him see him. _Not a camper at Camp Half-Blood. Not Ten, from Flushing, New York. The son of the God of the Dead._

 

**eighteen, part 3**

“The pegasus had been too close to the border of the wards around camp, and a hellhound had been roaming the perimeter. It was injured, but managed to get back to the stables for help. I had the bad luck of finding it.”

“I,” he says after a pause, “didn't talk for almost an entire year. I was too scared. In hindsight, I don’t have the _touch of death_ or anything ridiculous like that, they eventually figured out what happened and I was let off. But, say a Demeter kid loses control - maybe we have to fight some aggressive plants. But if they thought I lost it, and something happened? There’s no coming back from that. I would have lost _everything_. I think about that a lot.”

“That’s part of the reason I do what I do. Why I’m trying to take over the questing program. Why I stay out of the Hades cabin whenever I can, why I teach sparring. I want people to see, and know, and learn that I’m really not the son of the Lord of the Dead that they think I am. Even if that means being ridiculous sometimes.”

“You’re _scared_.” Taeyong hasn’t spoken in a while. There’s no bite behind his words, just simple amazement at the bowed head currently sitting in front of him, telling a story to the floor.

Ten stares at him now, unabashedly. “How aren’t you? The whole demigod thing really still hasn’t kicked in for you?”

“Oh no, it has.” It’s Taeyong’s turn to avoid Ten’s eyes. “There’s something about thinking you’re going to die any moment every day for three years that makes it really, really easy to ignore dumb things like _fate_ or _consequences_.”

“Isn’t that a little idealistic, Yong?”

“ _I_ don’t think so. Who else’s opinion matters?”

“The Fates. The prophecies, the Oracle, the gods. The fate of the world, if I squint.”

“This isn’t their legend, Ten, it’s ours. Doesn’t that mean we write it?”

He’s unreadable. “So you _do_ think so.”

“Think what.”

“That we could be something - anything - else.”

“I think we can be whatever we want us to be.”

“What do you want us to be, Yong?”

“I’m not sure yet. But I think I will be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. srry this swill is all u get after a 4 month disappearance but school's been kicking my ass  
> 2\. hope u enjoy, leave me a comment if u did <3

**Author's Note:**

> [tumblr](http://tenxism.tumblr.com)//[twitter](http://twitter.com/tenxism)<3


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